William Faulkner Biography

Writer

Name at birth: William Cuthbert Falkner

William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying (1930) and other novels, short stories and plays. Many of his stories took place in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and Faulkner's writings gave an almost mythological status to the culture of the southeastern United States. He also wrote screenplays for Hollywood, including the 1944 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. His most famous novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), Absalom! Absalom! (1936), and The Reivers (1962). In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature ""for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel."

Extra credit: During World War I, when Faulkner was trying to get into the Royal Air Force in Canada (he was too short for the Americans), he changed the spelling of his name so it would look more English. Faulkner did join the RAF, but never made it overseas... Faulker was preceded as Nobel Laureate by T.S. Eliot (1948) and followed by Bertrand Russell (1950).

Other American writers of Faulkner's era include John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor.