Essays on William Faulkner

September 25, 1897

July 6, 1962

Writer, poet

• The Sound and the Fury
• As I Lay Dying
• Light in August
• Absalom, Absalom!
• A Rose for Emily
• The Bear

• Nobel Prize in Literature (1949)
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1955, 1963)
• National Book Award (1951, 1955)

• “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
• “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
• “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
• “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”

September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962

William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, his reputation is based mostly on his novels, novellas, and short stories.

William Faulkner wrote numerous novels, screenplays, poems, and short stories. Today he is best remembered for his novels The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

Faulkner's writings often deal with the search for meaning, racism, the connection between past and present, and with social and moral burdens. Much of his writing was drawn from the history of the South and of his family.

William Faulkner is associated with the Modernist and Southern gothic literary movements. The majority of his novels are set in the postbellum American South. His most technically sophisticated works — including The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) — make use of Modernist writing techniques such as unreliable narrators and stream-of-consciousness narration.

By the time of his death Faulkner had clearly emerged not just as the major American novelist of his generation but as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, unmatched for his extraordinary structural and stylistic resourcefulness, for the range and depth of his characterization and social notation, and for his persistence and success in exploring fundamental human issues in intensely localized terms.

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”