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William Faulkner’s work has become influential over the years. However, most of it happened in small ways, slowly over time, such as how he made popular a certain kind of writing style, and nowadays it appears in fiction all over and we take it for granted. That writing style was what’s known as the stream-of-consciousness writing style, and it’s largely thanks to him that we have so many books written in it today. Faulkner led an interesting life that was filled with love for the place he grew up even though he was aware of its racist flaws, and that’s highly evident in all his works. So, let’s take a look at his life, writing style and the legacy he’s left behind to identify what turned him into one of the best American authors.
Faulkner’s Life
William Faulker’s childhood was the “characteristic open-air upbringing” of a white boy in the South during the 1800s, according to this Britannica article. He owned a pony and enjoyed riding it—this would grow into a love of horses that later influenced his writing—and was also introduced to guns and hunting, another activity that would flavor his reputation as an adult. Born in Albany, Mississippi, his parents moved to Oxford, Mississippi, when he was young, and he would call the place home for the rest of his life. “William Faulker” from Annenberg Learner states that his “fairly average” white-boy childhood involved being surrounded by captivatingly romantic and heroic tales of the Old South that were handed down to him from his grandfather, William Clark Falker, who was a “somewhat legendary figure.” Faulker’s grandfather was a colonel in the Civil War and, after, a planter, lawyer, novelist, and even a railroad builder before he died from a gunshot wound delivered by a former business partner in 1889.
The adventurous life of Faulker’s grandfather, filled with his many different professions, seemed to foreshadow Faulker’s own life, which, by the time he was a teenager, was “showing signs that his was not to be an average life.” He never finished high school (he even got his nose broken playing quarterback) so tried to work at his grandfather’s bank, but he stopped working there soon after starting. Then—in spite of the disapproval of his family and his friends— “decided to pursue a career as a poet.” According to this post from the American Society of Authors and Writers (ASAW) Faulker made up his mind to become a poet when he was only thirteen, and the reason for him to drop out of school was because he—ironically for someone destined to become a great author—received a D grade in English.
There was something else his family did not approve of, either—at this same time, Faulker was dating a local woman named Estelle Oldham; this was “unconventional behavior” in the family’s opinion. Estelle ended up marrying another man, so Faulker left to join the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Canada —although she would return to marry him some years later.
In his attempt to join the RAF, according to the ASAW article, Faulkner was “turned away for being too short,” even though he made his last name sound more British by adding a ‘u’ to its spelling—although whether this was a printing error or he came up with the change himself, no one really knows. Today, everyone knows him as Faulker with a ‘u,’ and seeing it spelled otherwise feels wrong. Frankly, that bit of simple deception is hilarious because it even ended up working; he got into the army—but before Faulker could experience any wartime action, the war ended. According to this article, the experience nevertheless “profoundly affected his imagination and supplied material for future writing.”
So, Faulker went back home to Mississippi, attended some classes, and got a job as the university postmaster instead. However, his fulfillment of his postmaster duties were extremely lackluster because the others working there asked him to resign after just three years. During this time, he submitted short stories and poetry to the campus newspaper, The Mississippian—considering that his “passion for writing dominated his life to the exclusion of other pursuits,” in the words of this Simply Charly article, it’s not hard to see why the others working there asked him to leave since he wasn’t being productive in the way they wanted or needed. Yet, knowing someone who would become a famous author was so utterly dedicated to their passions in the beginning, no matter what happened to other activities or relationships, is refreshing and invigorating to read about. According to the Annenberg Learner article about Faulker, near the end of 1924, he published his first poem collection, which was titled The Marble Faun. However, Faulker’s writing life didn’t take off immediately—not until he met the writer Sherwood Anderson, who gave him this advice: improve his prose and, when writing, to focus on what he knew best: the Mississippi he remembered growing up. He published his first full-length novel two years later in 1926—it was titled Soldier’s Play and was about the life of a man who “returned from the war physically and psychologically disabled” in the words of the ASAW website; Faulker’s early writing “shows the influence of Keats, Tennyson, and the literature of the 1890s”—and with the publication of The Sound and the Fury three years after that, in 1929, he “gained recognition as a serious writer”—because The Sound and the Fury was his first masterpiece. And so William Faulker’s writing legacy began.
Faulkner’s Writings
According to the official William Faulker-dedicated website, while Faulker found his writing voice by writing Flags in the Dust, his very first novel, The Sound and The Fury was a “highly experimental” piece of writing. These two novels, both published in 1929, “signaled the beginning of more than a decade of productivity and brilliance unmatched by any other American novelist.”
While Faulker was born thirty-two years after the Civil War ended, he grew up believing in the Confederacy—that the “South might have lost, but the North did not deserve to win,” as concisely stated by this article from The New Yorker. The belief in this lost cause was everywhere as he grew up, such as in textbooks and newspapers that praised “the paternalism and the prosperity of the slavery economy,” but Faulker’s novels were like lamps that shed the light of truth, declaring that “the Confederacy was both a military and a moral failure.”
The Sound and the Fury takes place in a fictional county called Yoknapatawpha, invented by Faulker, and chronicles the downfall of a once-prestigious family who lives there. The fictional county is described as “filled with battlefields and graveyards, veterans and widows, slaves and former slaves, draft dodgers and ghosts,” and no Southern person is spared from the “torturous influence” of the Civil War, which is featured in at least a dozen of Faulker’s novels, including the ones that take place in his fictional county.
His pride as a Mississippian is evident in his writings, since a whopping fourteen of them take place there. Furthermore, this article describes him as the perfect Southern Gothic author and his works as the perfect Gothic pieces because the place is “upset about the Civil War” in every detail and includes the war’s consequences in every aspect of its characters: the “resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic,” in the words of an internal citation.
As this article states, although The Sound and the Fury was the fourth novel Faulker published, it’s seen as his first work of genius—it’s widely considered to be one of the “greatest contributions to American literature and one of Faulkner's most heartfelt literary creations.” The novel is primarily recognized for how experimental it is in its form; Faulker’s writing style is “characterized by frequent time shifts, narrator shifts, unconventional punctuation and sentence structure,” and he even wrote it in a “stream-of-consciousness technique that reveals the inner thoughts of characters.”
For instance, Bessie Liu of The John Hopkins News-Letter writes that time in the novel is “nonlinear [and] circular,” it still remains “oddly satisfying to read” even though narrators jump years into the past or return to the present without warning the reader. When the central character in the first chapter, Benjy, interacts with adults, these interactions “launch him years into the past to relive related memories…with no visual indication of shifts in time.” Another character’s chapter is told using an omnipresent perspective. The book is about people who refuse to separate themselves from the past, and as such Faulker shapes the story around the failures of attempting to manipulate time. While other authors, such as Virginia Woolfe, used the technique before him, he was the first to use it in such a stunning way—essentially popularizing it, according to the Simply Charly article.
Faulkner’s Influence on Today
If you’ve heard of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, that’s because Faulkner was responsible for its creation. In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 1955 and 1963 he won Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction. In a wonderful move demonstrating his love for writing and dedication that authors of the future would be able to continue writing their creations, he used the prize money from these awards “to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers.” The Sound and the Fury is frequently cited as one of the best books of all time, and the “complex social and family issues” in his other stories are still relevant to this day.
Furthermore, this page from Mississippi History Now an international conference of Faulkner-loving critics and scholars gather at a conference named after him as well as his famous fictional county, Yoknapatawpha. Although his stream-of-consciousness style admittedly makes his books difficult to read, the fact a conference named after his most famous creation draws hundreds of people each year is a testament to the everlasting power of his imagination and the appeal of his life. Other Faulkner-dedicated conferences happen in France, Germany, and Japan as well, solidifying his international influence. There’s a research center based entirely around Faulkner at the Southeast Missouri State University, and the University of Mississippi “boasts an endowed professorship in the field.” Furthermore, as the article goes on to say, according to the Modern Language Association, close to 5,000 scholarly books and articles on Faulkner’s work have been published since the author’s death, which is more than on any other American writer.
Kressie Kornis writes that although his writing style can be difficult, it “challenges every corner” of readers’ minds; his works are “rich for critical thinking.” Faulkner “debatably looms the biggest” among Gothic authors; his experiments with different narrative structures, nontraditional frameworks and the implementation of fictional towns “created a template” for modern writers.
The fact we are used to reading books with flashbacks and chapters that jump from one point-of-view character today has its roots deep in Faulkner—his influence is as deep and as subtle as the unseen currents of the Mississippi itself. As this article so beautifully states, “Lest our students think many short stories are linear, sensible, and accessible, exposing them to thinkers such as Faulkner in literacy activities is valuable.”
Faulkner’s Writing Methods & Legacy
The unusual nature of Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness writing style has grown into something that’s prevalent in fiction today, and as a result, one can gain some fascinating bits of writing knowledge from the man who essentially popularized the style. This page has an excerpt from an interview within Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews from 1959 in which there’s a piece of writing advice from Faulkner: “The writer's only responsibility is to his art…Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all [goes by] to get the book written.” A story within an author is described as a dream they must get rid of—something they push out into the open no matter what.
When he was busy “writing his guts [out]” with The Sound and The Fury, however, he firmly believed it would never get published, and when it eventually did, states The Britannica, it gave him a massive boost of confidence. So, Faulkner plunged forward into writing more and more, always engaging readers with “new themes, new areas of experience, and, above all, new technical challenges.” While he was doing this, he wrote somewhere he knew he could do his best work: in “near isolation” in the “small-town remoteness” of Oxford, Mississippi.
While Faulkner’s writing style may be difficult to take in, he ended up creating a legacy that still influences the currents of literature today. Much like the waters of the Mississippi, which ebb and flow and change, Faulker’s reputation is known to scholars, critics, teachers and students in their classrooms, and more people continue discovering him. He wrote an enormous amount of prose and poetry during his lifetime, and although he “labored in obscurity” for most of it, his undeniable impact has ended up shaping the reading landscape of America just as the river from the state he so loved has shaped the land.