46 Fun Facts About William Faulkner

In which Mississippi town was Faulkner born in 1897?

New Albany was only his birthplace: the family moved to Oxford when he was five, and Oxford is the town he later rewrote as the Jefferson of his novels.

Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County is a stand-in for which real Mississippi county?

Lafayette County, whose seat is Oxford, was the model; Faulkner drew a map of his invented county by hand to go with his books.

In his Nobel speech, Faulkner said man would not merely endure but do what?

Prevail was his word: speaking in Stockholm in 1950, he argued that man is immortal because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.

Which two late Faulkner novels, not his famous early ones, won Pulitzer Prizes?

A Fable and The Reivers took the prize for 1955 and 1963, the second after his death, while The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying never won.

How did Faulkner's great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel and railroad builder, die?

Murdered by a business partner is how the story is told: a former railroad partner shot him on the town square of Ripley, just after he had won a seat in the legislature.

Faulkner's surname has which letter that the spelling he was born with lacked?

U was the letter: he was born a Falkner, and by one account he added it in 1918 to make the name look more English, while another blames a printer's error he let stand.

Which older Oxford friend with Yale and Ole Miss degrees mentored the teenage Faulkner?

Phil Stone, an Oxford lawyer four years older with degrees from Ole Miss and Yale, lent Faulkner books, introduced him to modern poetry and sent his early poems to publishers.

Which service did Faulkner join in 1918, using a forged letter of reference?

The Royal Air Force (Canada) sent him to train in Toronto, but the Armistice came before he finished, so he never saw combat, though he came home in an officer's uniform.

Which job did Faulkner leave, reportedly refusing to be at the beck and call of anyone with two cents?

Postmaster was the job: he read and played bridge on duty until a postal inspector turned up, and the two cents, in the parting line credited to him, were for a postage stamp.

In which city did Faulkner write his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, in 1925?

New Orleans is where he wrote it, lodging in the French Quarter with the artist William Spratling while he waited for a passage to Europe.

Which established writer helped get Faulkner's first novel published?

Sherwood Anderson recommended Soldiers' Pay to his own publisher, then urged Faulkner to write about his native Mississippi, advice that led to his invented county.

Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel was published in 1929, heavily cut, under what title?

Ben Wasson cut Flags in the Dust substantially and Harcourt, Brace published it as Sartoris in January 1929; the full text appeared under the original title in 1973.

From which Shakespeare play does the title The Sound and the Fury come?

The title comes from Macbeth's soliloquy in Act 5 of Shakespeare's Macbeth: life 'is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.'

Which family is at the centre of The Sound and the Fury?

The Compsons are a once-wealthy Mississippi family in decline; in 1945 Faulkner added an appendix tracing the clan's history all the way back to 1699.

Whose perspective opens The Sound and the Fury?

Benjy's section comes first, set on his 33rd birthday; he is intellectually disabled and his narration jumps through time without warning, one reason the novel is so difficult to read.

Which Faulkner novel about a Black farmer accused of murder was filmed in his hometown of Oxford in 1949?

Intruder in the Dust was shot on location in Oxford with Juano Hernandez as Lucas Beauchamp; Faulkner, no moviegoer, went to see it and called it 'a fine job'.

Where was Faulkner working night shifts when he began As I Lay Dying in 1929?

The university power house gave him quiet night shifts: by his own account he wrote the novel there in six weeks, in the small hours, without changing a word.

Who directed the 2013 film As I Lay Dying?

James Franco played Darl and leaned on split screens to handle a novel told by 15 different narrators across 59 chapters.

In As I Lay Dying, which of the children famously declares, 'My mother is a fish'?

Vardaman, the youngest child, says it in a chapter just five words long, a boy's attempt to make sense of his mother's death as the family hauls her coffin to Jefferson.

From which epic does the title As I Lay Dying come?

The title comes from Book XI of Homer's Odyssey, where the shade of Agamemnon tells Odysseus in Hades how Clytemnestra would not close his eyes 'as I lay dying'.

Which 1931 crime novel was Faulkner's commercial breakthrough, a book he claimed to have written purely for money?

Sanctuary became his best-selling book, though friends doubted his claim that he wrote it only for money; its kidnapped heroine, Temple Drake, reached the screen two years later.

What did Faulkner name the house he bought in 1930 and lived in until his death?

Rowan Oak joins two trees he chose as symbols, Scotland's rowan for peace and security and the live oak for strength and solitude.

What did Faulkner write directly on the walls of his office at home?

The outline of A Fable is still on his office wall: he set down the novel's Holy Week plot in graphite and red grease pencil, and it has been preserved as he left it.

Which studio first hired Faulkner as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1932?

MGM brought Faulkner to Hollywood in May 1932; on arrival he reportedly said he had an idea for Mickey Mouse, not realising Disney made the cartoons.

Which director became Faulkner's friend and frequent Hollywood collaborator?

Howard Hawks first worked with him on Today We Live (1933), from Faulkner's own war story 'Turnabout'; they hunted and drank together, and Hawks's brother became his agent.

Faulkner co-wrote the 1944 film To Have and Have Not, from a novel by which fellow Nobel laureate?

Ernest Hemingway's novel was reckoned his worst book, and the director had told him he could make a film even of that; Faulkner was brought in to help rewrite the story.

Which Raymond Chandler novel did Faulkner help adapt for the screen?

The Big Sleep has a plot so tangled that mid-shoot nobody knew whether the chauffeur was murdered or killed himself; asked by cable, Chandler admitted he didn't know either.

At which Hollywood restaurant was Faulkner said to go behind the bar to mix his own mint juleps?

Musso & Frank Grill became a writers' haunt in the 1930s partly because the Screen Writers Guild was across the street and a favourite bookshop stood next door.

A Fable, published in 1954, merged the Passion of Christ with what?

World War I's Unknown Soldier was the seed of the idea, which took him a decade to finish: a corporal leads a trench mutiny during Holy Week and is executed, a Christ figure in uniform.

Whose 1946 anthology, The Portable Faulkner, revived Faulkner's reputation?

Malcolm Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner when most of the novels were out of print; by mapping Yoknapatawpha as one connected saga, it won him new readers three years before the Nobel.

Faulkner's Nobel Prize was held over a year and presented in 1950 alongside which philosopher's prize?

Bertrand Russell collected the 1950 prize at the same ceremony: the committee had found no worthy winner in 1949, held that year's prize over, and then gave it to Faulkner.

Which institution made Faulkner its first Writer-in-Residence in 1957?

Virginia suited him, he said on arriving in 1957, 'because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs': a snob is too busy being one to meddle with you.

Which star played Boon Hogganbeck in the 1969 film of The Reivers, Faulkner's final novel?

Steve McQueen played Boon, who 'borrows' his boss's new automobile for a spree in Memphis with an 11-year-old boy in tow; the novel came out a month before Faulkner died.

What accident preceded Faulkner's fatal heart attack in July 1962?

A fall from his horse that June left him in severe back pain; in early July he entered a sanatorium at Byhalia and died of a heart attack within hours, aged 64.

What did Faulkner tell readers who could not understand his writing after two or three readings?

Read it four times, he told The Paris Review in 1956, the interview in which he also said Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is 'worth any number of old ladies' a writer might rob.

Which novel did Faulkner say he read every year, as some people read the Bible?

Don Quixote was one of the old favourites he said he returned to 'as you do to old friends'; he told The Paris Review in 1956 that those, not new books, were what he read.

Which three novels make up the Snopes trilogy?

The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959) follow Flem Snopes and his kin as they rise from a country hamlet to money and power in Jefferson.

Which Faulkner novel did the 1983 Guinness Book credit with literature's longest sentence, at 1,288 words?

Absalom, Absalom! held the Guinness title for a 1,288-word sentence, though far longer ones exist: Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club has one of 13,955 words.

Who is the plantation owner whose rise and fall is told in Faulkner's 1936 novel with a biblical title?

Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson with slaves and a French architect, builds a hundred-square-mile plantation, and loses his dynasty after disowning his first wife and son.

From which language do the two words that make up the name of Faulkner's fictional county come?

Chickasaw was the language: the word was an old name for the Yocona River near Oxford, and Faulkner told students it meant water passing unhurried through flat land.

Which 1935 Faulkner novel follows barnstorming racing pilots instead of the people of his fictional Mississippi county?

Pylon came out of Faulkner's own hobby: he flew privately for years, and his novel of daredevil air-show pilots was later filmed as The Tarnished Angels.

Which Faulkner story ends with an iron-gray hair on a pillow?

A Rose for Emily, first printed in The Forum in April 1930, is narrated by the whole town as 'we'; the hair shows that Emily had been lying beside her long-dead suitor.

Light in August opens with the journey of which pregnant young woman from Alabama?

Lena Grove, heavily pregnant, walks from Alabama into Jefferson seeking Lucas Burch, the father of her child; her journey frames the novel's darker story of Joe Christmas.

In a 1956 Life magazine essay, Faulkner urged civil rights activists to do what?

In 'A Letter to the North' (Life, March 1956) Faulkner told the NAACP to 'Go slow now'; James Baldwin's essay 'Faulkner and Desegregation' attacked that plea for a middle ground.

Which French writer made a stage adaptation of Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun?

Albert Camus adapted Requiem for a Nun for the Paris stage as Requiem pour une nonne; Sartre, another admirer, was quoted as saying that 'for young people in France, Faulkner is a god'.

Faulkner's estate sued, and lost, over a paraphrase of his 'The past is never dead' line in which Woody Allen film?

Midnight in Paris has its hero quote the line almost word for word and credit Faulkner by name; a judge dismissed the estate's suit in 2013 as fair use.