William Faulkner ( 1897 – 1962)

William Faulkner ( 1897 – 1962)

Faulkner's great grandfather, Colonel William Falkner (Faulkner added the "u" to his name), was born in 1825, and moved to Mississippi at the age of fourteen. He was a lawyer, writer, politician, soldier, and pioneer who was involved in several murder trials - including two in which he was accused - and was a best-selling novelist. During the Civil War he recruited a Confederate regiment and was elected its colonel, but his arrogance caused his troops to demote him, so he left to recruit another regiment. After the war he became involved in the railroad business and made a great deal of money. He bought a plantation and began to write books, one of which became a bestseller. He ran for Mississippi state legislature in 1889, but his opponent shot and killed him before the election.

Faulkner's grandfather was the colonel's oldest son, John Wesley Thompson Falkner. He inherited his father's railroad fortune and became first an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and then later the president of the First National Bank of Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner's father was Murray Falkner, who moved from job to job before becoming the business manager of the University of Mississippi, where he and his family lived for the rest of his life.

William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, and began to write poetry as a teenager. He was an indifferent student, and dropped out of high school when he was fifteen. During World War I, he joined the Canadian Royal Flying Corps - he was too short to join the U.S. Air Force - but never fought; the day he graduated from the Flying Corps, the Armistice was signed. The only "war injury" he received was the result of getting drunk and partying too hard on Armistice Day.

After the war, Faulkner came back to Oxford, enrolled as a special student at the University of Mississippi, and began to write for the school papers and magazines, quickly earning a reputation as an eccentric. His strange routines, swanky dressing habits, and inability to hold down a job earned him the nickname "Count Nocount." He became postmaster of the University in 1921, but resigned three years later, after the postal inspector finally noticed how much time Faulkner spent writing (and ignoring customers). In 1924 his first book of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published, but it was critically panned and had few buyers.

In early 1925, Faulkner and a friend traveled to New Orleans with the intention of getting Faulkner a berth on a ship to Europe, where he planned to refine his writing skills. Instead, Faulkner ended up staying in New Orleans for a few months and writing. There, he met the novelist Sherwood Anderson, whose book Winesburg, Ohio was a pillar of American Modernism. His friendship with Anderson inspired him to start writing novels, and in a short time he finished his first novel, Soldier's Pay, which was published in 1926 and was critically accepted - although it, too, sold few copies. Faulkner eventually did travel to Europe, but he quickly returned to Oxford to write.

Faulkner wrote four more novels between 1926 and 1931: Mosquitoes (1927), Sartoris(1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and As I Lay Dying (1930), but none of them sold well, and he earned little money during this period. Sartoris, also known as Flags in the Dust, was Faulkner's first book set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The difficulty Faulkner faced getting Flags in the Dust published led him to give up on the publishing process in general, and he decided to write only for himself. The result of this was The Sound and the Fury, the first of Faulkner's truly classic novels. The Sound and the Fury was published to good critical reception, although it still sold very few copies.

In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham. He lived with her and her two children from a previous marriage, Malcolm and Victoria, in Oxford, Mississippi. In 1931, Estelle gave birth to a daughter, Alabama, who died after just a few days. His only surviving biological daughter, Jill, was born in 1933. He is known to have had a romantic affair with Meta Carpenter, secretary of Howard Hawks, the screenwriter for whom Faulkner worked in Hollywood. From 1949-1953, he had an affair with Joan Williams, who wrote about the relationship in her 1971 novel The Wintering.

Faulkner wrote his next novel, As I Lay Dying, while working the night shift at a powerhouse. With this novel's publication, Faulkner was finally, if still falteringly, a writer on the literary scene. However, Faulkner still did not have any financial success until he published Sanctuary in 1931. He wrote Sanctuary to sell well, which it did, but it also tarnished his reputation in the eyes of some critics, and that affected his success for the rest of the decade. From then through the 1940s, Faulkner wrote several of his masterpieces, including Light In August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. At the time these books made Faulkner very little money, so he was forced to work in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

In 1950, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and, in typical Faulkner fashion, he sent his friends into a frenzy by stating that he would not attend the ceremony (although he eventually did go). This award effectively turned his career around, bringing him the economic success that had so long eluded him. However, most critics find the works he wrote after winning the prize largely disappointing, especially compared to his earlier, mythical works.

In the latter part of the 1950s, Faulkner spent some time away from Oxford, including spending a year as a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. He returned to Oxford in June of 1962 and died of a heart attack on the morning of July 6 of that year.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949

Banquet Speech by William Faulkner (excerpt)

A Rose For Emily 

You can listen to the story Here

Study The Story in Depth:

Psychological Character Analysis

Study Guide

Analysis 1

Analysis 2

Major Themes
Interpretation

Reading Questions for A Rose for Emily (William Faulkner, 1930)

Part 1

1. In the first paragraph of the story, we see that Faulkner uses a first person plural narrator. Why do you think Faulkner prefers this? How does this affect your understanding of the story?
2. Why is Miss Emily Grierson described as “a fallen monument”?
3. What could Miss Emily’s house represent? Comment on the narrator’s description of the house in the first and the fifth paragraphs.
4. Where does the story take place? Collect some information about the setting.
5. Comment on the following excerpt. “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town…”
6. What does the father’s portrait, as mentioned in the fifth paragraph, represent? Does the narrator mention about the portrait anywhere else in the story? If yes, in what ways could this be significant?
7. What could Miss Emily’s ticking watch symbolize? What does it tell us about Miss Emily? How does the watch contribute to our understanding of the themes of the story?

Part 2

1. Comment on the narrator’s sequence of events by referring to the events both in Part 1 and Part 2. How does this affect your understanding of the story?
2. Find the paragraphs in which the narrator mainly mentions about Miss Emily’s father and Miss Emily’s reaction towards her father’s death. Then examine the relationship between the daughter and the father.

Part 3

1. Part 3 opens with the following paragraph: “She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows–sort of tragic and serene.” What might be the reason for the narrator’s emphasis on her looking like a girl?
2. How does the narrator describe Homer Barron? What could “Homer” connote? What could Barron connote?
3. What do we learn about the attitude of the community towards the relationship between Homer Barron and Miss Emily in Part 3?

Part 4

1. What else do we learn about the Jefferson community’s reaction towards the relationship between Homer and Emily in the first four paragraphs of Part 4? Give some examples. From whose perspective do we learn all this? To what extent would you consider this information reliable?
2. Comment on the Baptist minister’s silence after his interview with Miss Emily: “Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister–Miss Emily’s people were Episcopal– to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again.”
3. Comment on the following excerpt: “When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.” Why not?

Part 5

1. In what way(s) could the crayon face of Miss Emily’s father be significant? Can you find a similar reference to her father in earlier sections of the story?
2. Comment on what the following excerpt might tell us about the relationship between Miss Emily and the townspeople: “…and the very old men –some in their brushed Confederate uniforms–on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”
3. After Miss Emily’s death, what do we discover in the room “which no one had seen in forty years”? Why is the second pillow on the bed important? What does it show to us? Discuss Miss Emily’s motive for her action.

More questions

1. Comment on the title of the story: What does “rose” symbolize?
2. What does the depiction of the manservant tell us about the historical and social context in America then? How do the townspeople approach him? What is his name and what might it connote?
3. Would you consider Miss Emily a scapegoat? Discuss.
4. Who is the protagonist of the story?
5. Who is the antagonist of the story? What does the antagonist represent in the story?
6. Why does the narrator scramble the chronology of events in the story?
7. What type of woman is represented through Miss Emily Grierson?
8. Find some references to social class in the story and discuss what these might indicate about the social and historical context in the story.
9. To what extent would you consider the story a critical commentary about Southern society? 

Discussion questions for William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

1. Reconstruct the time and place of the story. Although there are questions about the timeline (we only know that her taxes were remitted in 1894), Emily's youth is identified with the time and ideals of the pre-war Confederate South. Consider also that the story takes place in Jefferson, a small town in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, which goes through a great deal of change in this time, leaving behind but still claiming to value the Old South.
2. Are there any passages or aspects of the story which leave you confused or which seem irrelevant to the plot? Are you reminded of any other stories you have read or seen on film or television?
3. At what points did you notice any foreshadowing of the ending? Did the story prepare you to expect something different from Miss Emily?
4. This story is told by "we": who do you imagine this narrator (or narrators) to be? Young or old? Male or female? Both? What is their attitude toward Emily? How is this represented by their calling her "Miss Emily"? What do they remember about her? How does this shape your attitude toward her? Do you find yourself sympathizing with her situation as the center of the town's attention (and gossip)?
5. Women of the Old South and of a "good family" were often put on pedestals as paragons of virtue and respectability and given special treatment as "ladies." How do you see these attitudes at work in this story? How have they shaped Miss Emily's life and how people view her? Why is she called a "fallen monument" in the first paragraph?
6. What does the title tell you about the story? Why is it not called "A Rose for Miss Emily"? Read Faulkner's interpretation of the story, stated many years after he wrote it. What other interpretations are possible about the story which are different from or even contradictory to Faulkner's interpretation?