The war ended before he could participate in any action, however. He served briefly in the Canadian branch of the Royal Air Force during World War I after being rejected by the United States Army because he did not meet the weight and height requirements. Faulkner also used his great-grandfather as the model for his fictional character Colonel John Sartoris in his 1929 novel Sartoris.įaulkner did not complete his last year of high school, nor did he complete a college education, although he was admitted to the University of Mississippi as a special student. He was murdered on the street by a business partner, and Faulkner re-created this event several times in his fiction. William Clark had been a colonel in the Civil War, built railroads, and had also written a popular romance in 1881 called The White Rose of Memphis. William Clark Falkner, his great-grandfather, was a source of inspiration for the young Faulkner. Faulkner's ancestors came to America from Scotland during the eighteenth century. (He changed the spelling of his name in 1918.) When he was five years old, his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner would spend much of his life. The oldest of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler Falkner, William Cuthbert Falkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. Thus the idea for The Sound and the Fury was born. Faulkner claimed he loved the character of Caddy so much that he felt she deserved more than a short story. In a scene where Caddy has climbed a pear tree to look into the window where her grandmother's funeral is being held, her brothers are looking up at her and they see her muddy pants. The inspiration for the novel came from one of his short stories, 'Twilight.' He had created the character of Caddy in this story. He decided to refocus his attention back on his writing so that he could create a finely crafted work. Faulkner did, however, gain considerable critical recognition for the work.īefore writing The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner found himself overly involved with the problem of selling his previous books to publishers. The book was published in the year of the great stock market crash on Wall Street in 1929 and sales were meager. While he is called a Southern writer, most critics praise this book and many of Faulkner's other fictional works for their universal and humanistic themes. Faulkner set fifteen of his novels and many short stories in this geographical location that he invented, the descriptions of which mirror the area in northern Mississippi where he spent most of his life. The story is set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner created for the setting of his third novel Sartoris.

The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, was William Faulkner's fourth novel and is considered his first masterpiece.

Sound and the fury novel