1929 Faulkner example essay topic

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, as the oldest of four sons of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud (Butler) Faulkner. While he was still a child, the family settled in Oxford in north-central Mississippi. Faulkner lived most of his life in the town. About the age of 13, he began to write poetry.

At the Oxford High School he played quarterback on football team and suffered a broken nose. Before graduating he dropped out school and worked briefly in his grandfather's bank. After being rejected from the army because he was too short, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and had basic training in Toronto. He served with the RAF in World War I, but did not see any action. The war was over before he could make his first solo flight. This did not stop him later telling that he was shot down in France.

After the war he studied literature at the University of Mississippi for a short time. He also wrote some poems and drew cartoons for the university's humor magazine, The Scream. 'I liked the cartoons better than the poetry,' recalled later George W. Healy Jr., who edited the magazine. In 1920 Faulkner left the university without taking a degree. Years later he wrote in a letter, 'what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. ' Faulkner moved to New York City, where he worked as a clerk in a bookstore.

Then he returned to Oxford where he supported himself as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi. Faulkner was fired for reading on the job. He drifted to New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson encouraged him to write fiction rather than poetry. The early works of Faulkner bear witness to his reading of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, and the fin-de-si'e cle English poetry.

His first book, THE MARBLE FAUN, a collection of poems, appeared in 1924. It did not gain success. After spending some time in Paris, he published SOLDIER'S PAY (1926). The novel centered on the return of a soldier, who has been physically and psychologically disabled in WW I. It was followed by MOSQUITOES, a satirical portrait of Bohemian life, artist and intellectuals, in New Orleans. In 1929 Faulkner wrote Sartoris, the first of fifteen novels set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region of Mississippi - actually Yoknapatawpha was Lafayette County. The Chickasaw Indian term meant 'water passes slowly through flatland's.

' Sartoris was later reissued entitled FLAGS IN THE DUST (1973). The Yoknapatawpha novels spanned the decades of economic decline from the American Civil War through the Depression. Racism, class division, family as both life force and curse, are the recurring themes along with recurring characters and places. Faulkner used various writing styles. The narrative varies from the traditional storytelling (LIGHT IN AUGUST) to series of snapshots (AS I LAY DYING) or collage (THE SOUND AND THE FURY). ABSALOM, ABSALOM! , generally considered Faulkner's masterpiece.

It records a range of voices, all trying to unravel the mysteries of Thomas Sutpen's violent life. In 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham Franklin, his childhood sweetheart, who had divorced his first husband, a lawyer. Next year he purchased the traditional Southern pillared house in Oxford, which he named Rowan Oak. Architecture was important for the author - he obsessively restored his own house, named his books after buildings ('the mansion'), and depicted them carefully: 'It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. ' (from 'A Rose for Emily') With The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first masterwork, Faulkner gained recognition as a writer. While working at an electrical power station in a night shift job, he wrote As I Lay Dying (1930).

The book consists of interior monologues, most of them spoken by members of the Bundren family. Faulkner follows the illness, death, and burial of Addie Bundren. Her dying wish is to be buried in her home town. The family struggles through flood and fire to carry her coffin to the graveyard in Jefferson, Mississippi. The journey becomes Addie's curse.

'Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever. ' Cash, Addie's son, breaks his leg, Darl, another son, attempts to cremate his mother's body by setting fire to the barn, and Dewey Dell is raped in the cellar of a pharmacy. Addie is buried next to her father in the family plot.

Darl's sanity dies with her mother and he is taken finally to an asylum. Anse, the father, appears with a woman, introducing her as the new 'Mrs Bundren'..