William Faulkner Trivia
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46 free William Faulkner trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This William Faulkner trivia quiz covers the Mississippi novelist who built an entire fictional county and won the Nobel Prize for it. The easy questions are the ones any literature student knows: his home town, the name of his apocryphal county, the Shakespeare line behind The Sound and the Fury, and the year of his Nobel Prize. From there it moves into the life: the great-grandfather who was a Confederate colonel, the Canadian air-force stint in which he never flew, the typo that added a 'u' to his name, the post office he quit in style, and the Hollywood years with Howard Hawks. The harder end is for people who have read the novels more than once: the fifteen narrators of As I Lay Dying, the boy who says his mother is a fish, the 1,288-word sentence that made the Guinness Book, the map he drew for Absalom, Absalom!, the novel he called a potboiler, the outline written on his office wall at Rowan Oak, the Pulitzer jury that was overruled, and how his daughter found out about the Nobel. It also covers his complicated record on race and civil rights. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Faulkner, his novels, his stories and his home before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Ernest Hemingway, American literature and Nobel Prize quizzes next.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Mississippi town was Faulkner born in 1897?
New Albany
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.
Q 02Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County is a stand-in for which real Mississippi county?
Lafayette
Lafayette County, whose seat is Oxford, was the model; Faulkner drew a map of his invented county by hand to go with his books.
Q 03In his Nobel speech, Faulkner said man would not merely endure but do what?
Prevail
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.
Q 04Which two late Faulkner novels, not his famous early ones, won Pulitzer Prizes?
A Fable and The Reivers
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.
Q 05How did Faulkner's great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel and railroad builder, die?
Murdered by a business partner
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.
Q 06Faulkner's surname has which letter that the spelling he was born with lacked?
U
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.
Q 07Which older Oxford friend with Yale and Ole Miss degrees mentored the teenage Faulkner?
Phil Stone
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.
Q 08Which service did Faulkner join in 1918, using a forged letter of reference?
The Royal Air Force (Canada)
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.
Q 09Which job did Faulkner leave, reportedly refusing to be at the beck and call of anyone with two cents?
Postmaster
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.
Q 10In which city did Faulkner write his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, in 1925?
New Orleans
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.
Q 11Which established writer helped get Faulkner's first novel published?
Sherwood Anderson
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.
Q 12Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel was published in 1929, heavily cut, under what title?
Sartoris
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.
Q 13From which Shakespeare play does the title The Sound and the Fury come?
Macbeth
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.'
Q 21Which 1931 crime novel was Faulkner's commercial breakthrough, a book he claimed to have written purely for money?
Sanctuary
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.
Q 22What did Faulkner name the house he bought in 1930 and lived in until his death?
Rowan Oak
Rowan Oak joins two trees he chose as symbols, Scotland's rowan for peace and security and the live oak for strength and solitude.
Q 23What did Faulkner write directly on the walls of his office at home?
The outline of A Fable
Q 14Which family is at the centre of The Sound and the Fury?
The Compsons
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.
Q 15Whose perspective opens The Sound and the Fury?
Benjy's
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.
Q 16Which Faulkner novel about a Black farmer accused of murder was filmed in his hometown of Oxford in 1949?
Intruder in the Dust
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'.
Q 17Where was Faulkner working night shifts when he began As I Lay Dying in 1929?
The university power house
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.
Q 18Who directed the 2013 film As I Lay Dying?
James Franco
James Franco played Darl and leaned on split screens to handle a novel told by 15 different narrators across 59 chapters.
Q 19In As I Lay Dying, which of the children famously declares, 'My mother is a fish'?
Vardaman
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.
Q 20From which epic does the title As I Lay Dying come?
The Odyssey
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'.
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.
Q 24Which studio first hired Faulkner as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1932?
MGM
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.
Q 25Which director became Faulkner's friend and frequent Hollywood collaborator?
Howard Hawks
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.
Q 26Faulkner co-wrote the 1944 film To Have and Have Not, from a novel by which fellow Nobel laureate?
Ernest Hemingway
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.
Q 27Which Raymond Chandler novel did Faulkner help adapt for the screen?
The Big Sleep
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.
Q 28At which Hollywood restaurant was Faulkner said to go behind the bar to mix his own mint juleps?
Musso & Frank Grill
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.
Q 29A Fable, published in 1954, merged the Passion of Christ with what?
World War I's Unknown Soldier
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.
Q 30Whose 1946 anthology, The Portable Faulkner, revived Faulkner's reputation?
Malcolm Cowley
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.