Outline

THE AUTHOR

1. BIOGRAPHY

• Name: William Faulkner

• Birth Date: September 25, 1897

• Death Date: July 6, 1962

• Place of Birth: New Albany, Mississippi, United State

• Nationality: American

• Genres: Southern Gothic

• Occupations: Novelist, Author

2. WORKS

• Faulkner's most celebrated novels include:

• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• As I Lay Dying (1930)
• Light in August (1932)
• Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
• The Unvanquished (1938)

• Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories. His first short story collection, These 13 (1932), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including "A Rose for Emily," "Red Leaves", "That Evening Sun," and "Dry September."

3. AWARDS

• Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel".

• Two Pulitzer Prizes (“A Fable” in 1955 and “The Revivers” in 1963).

• Two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951.

• In 1946, Faulkner was one of three finalists for the first Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award.

4. STYLES and THEMES

• His writing style is a rich & demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate parts.

• 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 and Absalom, Absalom).

• One of Faulkner's primary themes is the abuse of blacks by the Southern whites.