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Faulkner 1897 - 1962 (65)

The past is never dead. It's not even past.


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As I lay down




William Faulkner was an American writer, one of the most important of the 20th century. He was born on September 25, 1897, in a small town near Oxford, Mississippi. He was a very bad student and did not finish high school. He tried to enlist in World War I but was not accepted because he was too short; he managed to enlist in the Canadian Air Force and then in the British Air Force. Returning to America, he enrolled in a college but soon dropped out of school and began to do whatever job he could find, writing poems at the same time. In one of his works, in the post office, he threw the letters in the trash instead of handing them over so that he could read literature and write poetry. In 1924 he did ancillary work for a small newspaper in New Orleans and one of his colleagues helped him to publish 1000 copies of his first collection of poems (The Marble Faun). After that he became a member of a literary circle where he was advised to leave poetry for prose. So he did, and in 1926 he presented his first novel. "The payment of the soldier".

In 1929 he got married and got a job, the night shift in a local power station. Among the charcoal shovels he occasionally threw into the boiler, from midnight to morning, he completed within six weeks, the book "As I Lay Dying".It was published in 1930 and became a great success. In the coming years he will write dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories and novels, as well as screenplays for Hollywood.

Despite being a well-known writer and making a lot of money, he lived with alcohol and depression and often ran out of money as he wasted his money recklessly. His first daughter died 5 days after her birth and Faulkner put her in a tiny coffin, carried her in his arms to the cemetery and buried her alone, without notifying anyone.

Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1962 and, for the second time, the Pulitzer Prize. In 1961 Faulkner had an accident with a horse that knocked him down, he spent some time in bed, very badly injured and in severe pain. He had not yet fully recovered when he died of a heart attack, on July 6, 1962.