William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897.
In the postwar period his reputation rebounded, as Malcolm Cowley\'s anthology The Po.
During the war he had been discovered by Sartre and Camus and others in the French literary world.
In 1944 all but one of Faulkner\'s novels were out of print, and his personal life was at low ebb due in part to his chronic heavy drinking. he worked as a screenwriter for MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Warner Brothers, forming a close relationship with director Howard Hawks, with whom he worked on To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Land of the Pharaohs, among other films.
Although Faulkner gained literary acclaim from these and subsequent novels--Light in August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942)--and continued to publish stories regularly in magazines, he was unable to support himself solely by writing fiction.
That same year he married Estelle Oldham, whom he had courted a decade earlier.
In the meantime he had completed The Sound and the Fury, and when it appeared at the end of 1929 he had finished Sanctuary and was ready to begin writing As I Lay Dying.
His next book, Flags in the Dust, was heavily cut and rearranged at the publisher\'s insistence and appeared finally as Sartoris in 1929.
Faulkner\'s first novel, Soldier\'s Pay, was published in 1926, followed a year later by Mosquitoes, a literary satire.
His literary aspirations were fueled by his close friendship with Sherwood Anderson, whom he met during a stay in New Orleans.
Faulkner had begun writing poems when he was a schoolboy, and in 1924 he published a poetry collection, The Marble Faun, at his own expense.
Mostly, however, he educated himself by reading promiscuously.
After the war, he took some classes at the University of Mississippi and worked for a time at the university post office.
Army, he passed himself off as British and joined the Canadian Royal Air Force in 1918, but the war ended before he saw any service.
Rejected for pilot training in the U.
S.
When Faulkner was five his parents moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he received a desultory education in local schools, dropping out of high school in 1915.
His family was rooted in local history: his great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel and state politician, was assassinated by a former partner in 1889, and his grandfather was a wealth lawyer who owned a railroad.
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897
