Faulkner Born: Southern Gothic's Master Storyteller

William Faulkner mapped the fictional Yoknapatawpha County onto the American South and populated it with characters whose stream-of-consciousness narratives dismantled conventional storytelling. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, he grew up in Oxford, the town that would become the model for his fictional Jefferson, and began writing poetry before discovering that prose was the form that could contain the stories he needed to tell. His early novels sold poorly. Sartoris in 1929 introduced Yoknapatawpha, but it was The Sound and the Fury, published the same year, that announced a writer operating at a level of formal ambition that American literature had rarely attempted. The novel's first section is narrated by Benjy, a man with severe intellectual disabilities whose perception of time is nonlinear, and the reader must reconstruct events from fragments of sensory experience. Faulkner followed it with As I Lay Dying, written in six weeks while working the night shift at a power plant, and then Absalom, Absalom!, whose nested narratives and baroque sentences pushed the English language to its structural limits. He supported himself by writing screenplays in Hollywood, working on films including The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not, while producing novels that sold modestly and earned reviews that ranged from awestruck to bewildered. The Nobel Prize came in 1949, awarded belatedly for his body of work, and his acceptance speech in Stockholm became one of the most quoted addresses in literary history. He influenced every major novelist who followed, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who credited Faulkner with showing him that all of Latin American reality could be contained in a single fictional town, to Toni Morrison, whose narrative techniques owed explicit debts to his experiments.