Yoknapatawpha County won Faulkner the 1949 Nobel
William Faulkner (25 September 1897 – 6 July 1962) mapped fictional Yoknapatawpha County onto real Mississippi clay. Raised in Oxford after a New Albany birth, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War I without seeing combat, then built a Nobel-winning saga Cowley’s 1946 Portable volume helped America finally notice.
The family moved to Oxford in 1902 after his mother vetoed a ranching venture in Texas; his father ran a livery stable and hardware store before managing the University of Mississippi's business affairs. Elders filled the boy with tales of the Civil War, slavery, the Klan and his great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, a Confederate colonel twice acquitted of murder who became a legislator and railroad investor before a partner shot him dead. That figure resurfaces across the fiction. Bright early, the boy skipped second grade, then withdrew, played truant, repeated the last two grades and never graduated.
Phil Stone, four years older and armed with degrees from Yale and Ole Miss, spotted his talent at seventeen, fed him Joyce, and sent out his poems, which publishers rejected. Visiting Stone at Yale in 1918, he met Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. That year Estelle Oldham, the sweetheart he expected to marry, accepted another man's proposal. He enlisted in Toronto with a forged reference, served 179 days as a private without ever flying, then came home telling false war stories and faking a wound. His surname gained its u around this time, reportedly through a typesetter's slip that he shrugged off.
At Ole Miss he lasted three semesters, earned a D in English and dropped out in November 1920. Odd jobs followed, in a New York bookshop, as a carpenter and as university postmaster, a post he quit rather than be at the beck and call of anyone with two cents for a stamp. He wrote Soldiers' Pay in New Orleans in 1925 and Sartoris, his first Yoknapatawpha book, in 1927.
In Hollywood he worked on Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not, the only film shaped by two Nobel laureates. A Fable and The Reivers each won the Pulitzer, and Ralph Ellison called him the South's greatest artist. He died of a heart attack in 1962, a month after falling from his horse.
Source: William Faulkner
