William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897 and was the oldest of four sons of Murray and Maud Faulkner. When he was a child, his family moved to Oxford in Mississippi where he lived for the majority of his childhood. When he was 13, he began to write poetry and went to school at Oxford High School where he played quarterback for the football team. Faulkner was rejected from the military because of his height and decided to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. He never saw any action in the war and began to study literature at the University of Mississippi. Faulkner left the school in 1920 without a degree and moved to New York where he worked as a book store clerk. He eventually ended up in New Orleans where he was encouraged by Sherwood Anderson to write fiction rather than poetry.
Faulkner wrote his first book of poems, The Marble Faun, in 1924 which did not gain very much success. He also wrote the two books, Soldier's Pay and Mosquitoes, which gained somewhat more fame than his first book. In 1929 Faulkner wrote Sartoris, the first of fifteen novels that all took place Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Sartoris was later reprinted in 1973 entitled Flags in the Dust. The Yoknapatawpha novels overlooked the American Civil war to the Depression, examining the economic decline of society. Separation of classes, views on family, and racism are the recurring themes along with similar characters and places. Faulkner used various writing styles such as traditional storytelling, series of snapshots, or collages. Stories about Yoknapatawpha blacks are one of Faulkner's most frequently analyzed themes. Absalom, Absalom!, has generally been considered one of Faulkner's masterpieces. Some of his other well known works are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).
In 1939, Faulkner was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1948 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the Howells Medal for Fiction in 1950 and also received the American Academy of Art and Letters Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1951, he won the National Book Award for The Collected Stories of William Faulkner and also won the Medal of the French Legion d'Honneur. In 1955, he won the Pulitzer Prize along with the National Book Award for A Fable. He won the Silver Medal of the Greek Academy and finally won the gold in 1962.
