Yesterday Fitzgerald. Today Faulkner. This American master was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
History haunts the present in William Faulkner’s novels, as this famous line from Requiem for a Nun (1951) suggests. Faulkner’s great novels focus on the decline of the southern aristocracy in and around the fictional town of Jefferson. He invented old Mississippi families like the Compsons, the Bundrens, the Sutpens, and the McCaslins in such novels as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and interrelated short stories like those in Go Down, Moses (1942).
A high school dropout, he flew planes and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War I. Eventually recognized with the Nobel Prize in 1949, Faulkner couldn’t pay the bills with his fiction. Like many writers of his day, Faulkner went west, seeking income as a Hollywood screenwriter.
Here is his New York imes obituary
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0925.html
Think you know this American literary master? Take this quick quiz excerpted from Don’t Know Much About Literature and find out.
1. Which mentally retarded character narrates the first section of The Sound and the Fury?
2. Which Faulkner masterpiece takes its title from a Biblical passage in which King David mourns his dead son?
3. Which movie, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, had a screenplay adapted by William Faulkner from a novel by Ernest Hemingway?
Answers
1. Yoknapatawpha County.
2. Absalom, Absalom!
5. To Have and Have Not (1944). Faulkner also adapted Raymond Chandler’s novel for the 1946 Bogart and Bacall movie, The Big Sleep.
