More Initial Comments

Let's lay out the basics of Faulkner's work and career:

1. Faulkner was born in Mississippi around the turn of the 20th century. His parents weren't wealthy, but he came from a prosperous family. His grandfather and great-grandfather were well-known attorneys and politicians, and they were active in Mississippi politics.

2. Faulkner wanted to be a soldier, but he didn't want to be a common infantryman. He went to Canada and enlisted in the Royal Air Force, but managed things so that he never actually fought in a battle or engaged the enemy in combat.

3. Faulkner went through a period in his youth where he traveled extensively - Paris for a time, New York, New Orleans, and eventually back to Mississippi.

4. Faulkner started as a poet. He wrote verse for a considerable part of his early career.

5. Faulkner really struggled to make a living as a writer. He had a job, for a time, working for the University of Mississippi, where his father had an important job. After some early successes and some interest from intellectuals, he quit that job and tried to earn a living as a writer. In many ways, he failed. He was given the opportunity to write scripts for Hollywood movies with a regular paycheck, and Faulkner jumped at the opportunity. Some of his best novels were written during this period.

6. Partly because of this struggle, Faulkner constantly wrote different kinds of work - short fiction for the mass market that was meant to be shocking and bloody (Faulkner used the term "potboiler"), and more serious work that was meant to be the kind of "high literature" that he admired in people like Joyce and Proust.

7. Sometimes, this "potboiler" work found its way into his longer, more "serious" fiction. Sanctuary, by far his best seller during his lifetime, was written intentionally as a potboiler. Absalom, Absalom, which contained material almost as shocking, was not intended to be a potboiler - but where were the lines drawn?

8. Faulkner effectively gave up on being a writer in the 40's, and he spent considerable time and effort in Hollywood during this time. This is when he wrote the full screenplays To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep.

9. Faulkner was persuaded into a Portable Faulkner that helped begin to re-establish him in the postwar (WWII) climate. Malcolm Cowley was an important part of this re-establishment, as was the boom in publishing, and especially paperbacks. Faulkner's Sanctuary was re-issued as a mass market paperback, and sold extensively.

10. Faulkner was talked into writing Intruder in the Dust. It turned out to be a big seller (partly through the influence of Random House, who also secured a movie deal for him), and helped get him the Nobel Prize a short time later.

11. After the Nobel Prize, Faulkner became a celebrity. He was given an honorary post at the University of Virginia, and became something of a museum piece.

12. Faulkner died trying to ride a horse.

I'll write more on this later.