William Faulkner

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1) Author William Faulkner is today recognized as one of America’s greatest writers on the basis of a body of novels that so convincingly portray the culture of the South in the years following the Civil War, with its citizens overcome by grief and defeat and trying to cling to old values while struggling to take their place in a changing world. The acclaim that today is Faulkner’s, however, was slow in coming.

2) Though Faulkner was praised by some critics and reviewers during the first part of his career, his novels did not sell well and he was considered a fairly marginal author. For the first few decades of his career, he made his living writing magazine articles and working as a screenwriter rather than as a novelist. Throughout this period, he continued to write, though his novels, sometimes noted for the stirring portrait that they presented of life in the post-Civil War South, were generally relegated to the category of strictly regional writing and were not widely appreciated.

3) Beginning in 1946, Faulkner’s career took an unexpected and dramatic turn as Faulkner came to be recognized as considerably more than a regional writer. The Portable Faulkner was published in that year by Viking Press; two years later he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Arts and Letters; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. Over the next decade, his work was recognized in various ways, including a National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes, and he became a novelist in residence at the University of Virginia. His success led to a degree of affluence that enabled him to take up the life of a southern gentleman, including horseback riding and fox hunting. Ironically, he died as a result of an accident related to these gentlemanly pursuits, succumbing as a result of injuries suffered during a fall from a horse.