About the Author

His narrow, weathered boots still stand erect at the foot of his bed in the upstairs bedroom of Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford. In physical stature, William Faulkner stood not much taller than the jockeys he emulated as he rode the high-bred geldings on his Mississippi farm. In twentieth-century American literature, however, Faulkner towers above his peers as the architect of an entire kingdom, populated with generations of fallen aristocratic families and ne'er-do-well Southern clans whose provincial conflicts address the full panoply of human passions in crisis.

Aside a youthful excursion to Europe, sojourns in Hollywood as a screenwriter and, late in life, as a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, Faulkner rarely strayed beyond his northern Mississippi neighborhood in Oxford. He was a frequent visitor to the town square and the courthouse that punctuated the county seat of Lafayette County, "Yoknapatawpha County" in his novels, with "Jefferson" as its Oxford counterpart.

William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, but he soon relocated with his family in Oxford. Although he never finished high school, he joined the Canadian Royal Flying Corps, but returned to Oxford where he entered the University of Mississippi. As a student, he served without distinctions as the postmaster of the university, but he left for New Orleans in 1922 where he met Sherwood Anderson. He published The Marble Faun (1924) and his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926) and left for a six-month trek through Europe. He returned shortly, however, to Oxford and began the saga of his fictional fiefdom, including the Sartoris and Compson families in Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury, respectively. As I Lay Dying (1930) and Sanctuary (1931) reflect his range from the comic to the horrific. Along that line are found the comic trilogy of the Snopes clan, The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). Other works of significance include Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), Requiem for a Nun (1951) -- produced as a motion picture -- and A Fable (1954). Of his short works, "The Bear" (from Go Down, Moses (1942), and "Old Man" remain arguably his most popular.

The 1949 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Faulkner was feted in France as well as in the United States, receiving a National Book Award for his Collected Stories. Yet, his works remain dense and difficult for most readers, as demanding in his fluid and elliptical prose as is Ezra Pound's enigmatic poetry. Often elusive in theme, Faulkner, nevertheless, insisted on his purpose as a writer "to lift the human heart," to remind it of the "pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice that have been the glory of its past" and, like the poet, to serve as "one of the props, the pillars, to help [humanity] to endure and prevail" (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1950).

Faulkner remained in Oxford throughout most of his life, along with his wife, Estelle Oldham, and their children, in the 1848 antebellum home he called "Rowan Oak." He died in his beloved Mississippi in 1962.