William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. He joined the Canadian Airforce after being rejected from the US Airforce for not meeting the physical requirements. Faulkner didn’t have much interest in formal education and dropped out of high school as well as the University of Mississippi which he attended for two years after his time in the Airforce. Previous to the Civil War Faulkner’s family  acquired a large sum of wealth which they lost in the course of the war. Because of this loss they experienced, Faulkner often talks of the history and traditions of the Old South.

Faulkner began his writing when his family relocated to Oxford, Mississippi. After dropping out if University of Mississippi, Faulkner took a job at the school and spent his time working on his writing; Faulkner was fired from his position in 1924. His first published piece was a collection of poems entitled The Marble Faun but it did not sell well. Sherwood Anderson advised him to try writing some prose as poetry was not his strong suit. Faulkner later published a novel MOSQUITOS satirizing New Orleans writing and writers, including Anderson. Their friendship suffered as a result and Anderson cut off their tied though Faulkner continued to admire his old friend.

Faulkner’s writing is often known for its stream of consciousness and distortion of time. He attempted to create his own world through several of his novels. Faulkner developed a town called Jefferson located in Yoknapatawpha County which he modeled after Oxford where he began his writing. Faulkner was also interested in the aftermath effects of slavery in the South and the struggle with identity many people of mixed race experienced.

Faulkner married Estelle Oldham in 1929 and had two children with her, one of them died just nine days after birth. In 1932 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios hired him to write screenplays and he relocated to Hollywood, CA. Faulkner was not comfortable in his new environment and began to drink heavily. However, Faulkner’s funds from screenwriting provided him with money to continue his own fiction writing. He later helped write the script for Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, however his novel sales twiddled and eventually his books went out of print during WWII.

Although Faulkner’s sales did not reach astounding heights, Faulkner received a number of writing awards, one of the most notable being the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Other awards included the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Howell Medal for fiction (1951), National Book Award for his Collection of stories and the National Institute’s Gold Medal for fiction. Faulkner continued to travel the world writing screenplays, visiting places like Egypt, Brazil and Greece. He also became involved in advocating Civil Rights. Faulkner unfortunately passed away in 1962 as a result of a heart attack.

Sources:

http://www.egs.edu/library/william-faulkner/biography/

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-bio.html