William Faulkner was born in
New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897,
the oldest of four brothers in a southern family of aristocratic
origin. Faulkner spent much of his life in and around his beloved
hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, where he worked various odd jobs
and wrote in his spare time in the years leading up to his literary
fame. Stints in New York and Paris introduced Faulkner to the culture
and major figures of the Modernist literary movement, an early twentieth-century
response to a world marked by rapid and often bewildering technological
development. Modernism in literature was characterized by experimentation
with language and literary conventions, and Faulkner became one
of the movement’s major figures. In 1924,
Faulkner published his first book, a collection of poetry titled The
Marble Faun. Faulkner published his fourth novel, The
Sound and the Fury, in 1929,
and though The Sound and the Fury is often considered
his masterpiece, it was his sixth novel, Sanctuary, in 1929,
that finally won him an audience and a literary career. The
Sound and the Fury, however, marked the beginning of Faulkner’s
use of experimental narrative techniques to explore the psychological
complexity of his characters and their interactions more thoroughly
than a traditional style would have allowed.
As I Lay Dying, originally published
in 1930, is one of
the most vivid testaments to the power of this new style, with Faulkner’s
usually complex and lengthy paragraphs trimmed down with a conscientious
economy to form a clear, unified plot. Much of this clarity can
be attributed to the intensity of Faulkner’s vision for the work and
the careful planning and outlining he did before sitting down to write.
Whereas Faulkner conceived many of his other works in a scattered
fashion, he fully imagined the innovative concepts of As
I Lay Dying ahead of time, furiously scribbling down his
revelations on the back of an upturned wheelbarrow. This organization
reflects the great hopes that Faulkner pinned on the novel—he had
recently married his high school sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and
hoped his saga of the Bundren family would finally ensure a steady
income for his family and a greater literary reputation for himself.
The result is a novel of some daring, one that forgoes the unified
perspective of a single narrator and fragments its text into fifty-nine
segments voiced from fifteen different perspectives. In writing As
I Lay Dying in this way, Faulkner requires his readers
to take an active part in constructing the story, allows for multiple
and sometimes conflicting interpretations, and achieves remarkable
levels of psychological insight.
In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner first introduces
Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional rendition of his native Lafayette
County, Mississippi, which became the setting for most of his best-known
works. The novels set in Yoknapatawpha County can even be read as
one intricate story, in which the same places, events, families,
and people turn up over and over again. For example, Vernon and
Cora Tull, who appear in As I Lay Dying, also appear
in The Hamlet, a later novel. Before Faulkner,
the American South was widely portrayed in American literature as
a backward, impossibly foreign land. The complexity and sophistication
of the Yoknapatawpha novels changed many of these perceptions, and
it is largely due to Faulkner’s influence that the South is now
recognized as one of the country’s most fertile literary regions.
Faulkner himself, however, did not fare well financially, and he
was eventually forced to take work as a screenwriter in Hollywood
to supplement his dwindling income. His fortunes were revived, however,
with the 1946 publication
of The Portable Faulkner, which featured a large
and varied selection of his writings. He won the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1949,
and a pair of Pulitzer Prizes followed in 1955 and 1962. Faulkner
continued to write about Yoknapatawpha until his death in Byhalia,
Mississippi, on July 6, 1962,
at the age of sixty-four.
