William Cuthbert Faulkner example essay topic

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons born to Murry and Maud Butler Faulkner. He was named after his great-grandfather, William Clark Faulkner, the "Old Colonel", who had been killed eight years earlier in a duel with his former business partner in the streets of Ripley, Mississippi. A lawyer, politician, planter, businessman, Civil War colonel, railroad financier, and finally a best-selling writer (of the novel The White Rose of Memphis), the Old Colonel, even in death, loomed as a larger-than-life model of personal and professional success for his male descendants. A few days before William's fifth birthday, the Faulkner's moved to Oxford, Mississippi, at the urging of Murry's father, John Wesley Thompson Faulkner. Called the "Young Colonel" out of homage to his father rather than to actual military service, the younger Falkner had abruptly decided to sell the railroad begun by his father. Disappointed that he would not inherit the railroad, Murry took a series of jobs in Oxford, most of them with the help of his father.

The elder Faulkner, meanwhile, founded the First National Bank of Oxford in 1910 with $30,000 in capital. William demonstrated artistic talent at a young age, drawing and writing poetry, but around the sixth grade he began to grow increasingly bored with his studies. His earliest literary efforts were romantic, conscientiously modeled on English poets such as Burns, Thomson, Housman, and Swinburne. While still in his youth, he also made the acquaintance of two individuals who would play an important role in his future: a childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and a literary mentor, Phil Stone.

Estelle was a popular, vivacious girl in Oxford with an active social life that included dances and parties. Despite her romance with William, she dated other boys, one of whom was Cornell Franklin, an Ole Miss law student who proposed marriage. She lightheartedly accepted, apparently believing his request insincere since he was going to Hawaii to establish a law practice. When he sent her an engagement ring several months later, however, her parents thought Franklin would be a fine husband for their daughter, and she found herself unable to escape the circumstances. She and Franklin were married in Oxford on April 18, 1918. William's other close acquaintance from this period arose from their mutual interest in poetry.

When Stone read the young poet's work, he immediately recognized William's talent and set out to give Faulkner encouragement, advice, and models for study. Like Franklin, Stone was a lawyer, schooled at Ole Miss and Yale. Following Estelle's marriage, he invited Faulkner to stay with him in New Haven, where Faulkner first took a job with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (where, for the first time, his name was spelled "Faulkner" in employee records, possibly the result of a typing error). But his job did not last long, for in June he accepted an invitation to become a cadet in training in the Royal Air Force in Canada..