William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based mostly on his novels, novellas, and short stories. He was also a published poet and an occasional screenwriter.

The majority of his works are based in his native state of Mississippi. Faulkner is considered one of the most important writers of Southern literature, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Faulkner has often been cited as one of the most important writers in the history of American literature.

Born William Cuthbert Faulkner in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons to Murry Cuthbert Faulkner (August 17, 1870 – August 7, 1932) and Maud Butler (November 27, 1871 – October 19, 1960).[3] He had three younger brothers – Murry Charles "Jack" Falkner (June 26, 1899 – December 24, 1975), author John Faulkner (September 24, 1901 – March 28, 1963) and Dean Swift Faulkner (August 15, 1907 – November 10, 1935).

Faulkner was raised in and heavily influenced by the state of Mississippi, as well as by the history and culture of the American South altogether. Only four days prior to his fifth birthday, the Faulkner family settled in Oxford, Mississippi on September 21, 1902, where he resided on and off for the remainder of his life.

Faulkner demonstrated an aptitude for oil painting and poetry writing in early childhood, however grew increasingly disillusioned with any and all artistic pursuits in the sixth grade. He instead directed his attention to literature, and later stated that he modeled his early writing on the Romantic era in late 18th century and early 19th century in England. He attended the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, and was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon social fraternity. He enrolled at Ole Miss in 1919, and attended three semesters before dropping out in November 1920.

The younger Faulkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of African-Americans and Caucasians, his characterization of Southern characters, and his timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people dwelling behind the façades of good old boys and simpletons. Unable to join the United States Army due to his height (he was 5' 5½"), Faulkner enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps, later training at RFC bases in Canada and Britain, yet never experienced wartime action during the First World War.

In 1918, upon enlisting in the RFC, Faulkner himself made the change to his surname. However, according to one story, a careless typesetter simply made an error. When the misprint appeared on the title page of his first book, Faulkner was asked whether he wanted a change. He supposedly replied, "Either way suits me." Although Faulkner is heavily identified with Mississippi, he was residing in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, after being directly influenced by Sherwood Anderson to attempt fiction writing. The miniature house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans is now the premises of Faulkner House Books, where it also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.

Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville from February to June 1957. He suffered serious injuries in a horse-riding accident in 1959, and died due to a myocardial infarction at age 64 at approximately 1:32 am on July 6, 1962, at Wright's Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi. He is buried along with his family in St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford, along with a family friend with the mysterious initials E.T.

In California

In the early 1940s, Howard Hawks invited Faulkner to come to Hollywood to become a screenwriter for the films Hawks was directing. Faulkner happily accepted because he badly needed the money, and Hollywood paid well. Thus Faulkner contributed to the scripts for the films Hawks made from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. Faulkner became good friends with Hawks, the screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides, and the actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

An apocryphal story regarding Faulkner during his Hollywood years found him with a case of writer's block at the studio. He told Hawks he was having a hard time concentrating and would like to write at home. Hawks was agreeable, and Faulkner left. Several days passed, with no word from the writer. Hawks telephoned Faulkner's hotel and found that Faulkner had checked out several days earlier. It seems Faulkner had spoken quite literally, and had returned home to Mississippi to finish the screenplay.

Personal life

As a teenager in Oxford, Faulkner dated Estelle Oldham, the popular daughter of Major Lemuel and Lida Oldham, and believed he would some day marry her. However, Estelle dated other boys during their romance, and one of them, Cornell Franklin, ended up proposing marriage to her before Faulkner did, in 1918. Estelle's parents insisted she marry Cornell, as he was an Ole Miss law graduate, had recently been commissioned as a major in the Hawaiian Territorial Forces, and came from a respectable family with which they were old friends. Fortunately for Faulkner, Estelle's marriage to Franklin fell apart ten years later, and she was divorced in April 1929. Faulkner married Estelle in June 1929 at College Hill Presbyterian Church just outside of Oxford, Mississippi. They honeymooned on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at Pascagoula, then returned to Oxford, first living with relatives while they searched for a home of their own to purchase. In 1930 Faulkner purchased the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known at that time as "The Bailey Place." He and his daughter, Jill, lived there until after her mother's death. The property was sold to the University of Mississippi in 1972. The house and furnishings are maintained much as they were in Faulkner's day. Faulkner's scribblings are still preserved on the wall there, including the day-by-day outline covering an entire week that he wrote out on the walls of his small study to help him keep track of the plot twists in the novel A Fable.

Faulkner's accomplishments were despite a lifelong drinking problem. Since he rarely drank while writing, instead preferring to binge after a project's completion, it is generally agreed that his alcohol use was an escape from the pressures of everyday life and unrelated to his creativity. Whatever the source of his addiction, it undoubtedly weakened his health.

Faulkner is known to have had several extramarital affairs. One was with Howard Hawks's secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter. The other, lasting from 1949 to 1953, was with a young writer, Joan Williams, who considered him her mentor. She made her relationship with Faulkner the subject of her 1971 novel The Wintering.

When Faulkner visited Stockholm in December 1950 to receive the Nobel Prize, he met Else Jonsson (1912–1996) and they had an affair that lasted until the end of 1953. Else was the widow of journalist Thorsten Jonsson (1910–1950), reporter for Dagens Nyheter in New York 1943–1946, who had interviewed Faulkner in 1946 and introduced his works to the Swedish readers. At the banquet in 1950 where they met, publisher Tor Bonnier referred to Else as widow of the man responsible for Faulkner being awarded the prize.

Faulkner also had a romance with Jean Stein, an editor, author, and daughter of movie mogul Jules Stein.

Writing

From the early 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, when Faulkner left for California, he published 13 novels and numerous short stories, the body of work that grounds his reputation and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize at the age of 52. This prodigious output, mainly driven by an obscure writer's need for money, includes his most celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves", "That Evening Sun", and "Dry September".

Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County—based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat. Yoknapatawpha was Faulkner's "postage stamp", and the bulk of work that it represents is widely considered by critics to amount to one of the most monumental fictional creations in the history of literature.[citation needed] Three novels, The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion, known collectively as the Snopes Trilogy, document the town of Jefferson and its environs as an extended family headed by Flem Snopes insinuates itself into the lives and psyches of the general populace. It is a stage wherein rapaciousness and decay come to the fore in a world where such realities were always present, but never so compartmentalized and well defined; their sources never so easily identifiable.

Additional works include Sanctuary (1931), a sensationalist "pulp fiction"-styled novel, characterized by André Malraux as "the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story." Its themes of evil and corruption, bearing Southern Gothic tones, resonate to this day. Requiem for a Nun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary, is the only play that Faulkner published, except for his The Marionettes, which he essentially self-published—in a few hand-written copies—as a young man.

Faulkner is known for an experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats.

In an interview with The Paris Review in 1956, Faulkner remarked, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him." Another esteemed Southern writer, Flannery O'Connor, stated that "the presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."

Faulkner also wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small printings, The Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933), and a collection of crime-fiction short stories, Knight's Gambit (1949).

Awards

In 1946, Faulkner was one of three finalists for the first Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award. He came in second to Manly Wade Wellman. Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." Though he won the Nobel prize for 1949, it was not awarded until the 1950 awards banquet, when Faulkner was awarded the 1949 prize and Bertrand Russell the 1950 prize. He donated a portion of his Nobel winnings "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers", eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He donated another portion to a local Oxford bank to establish an account to provide scholarship funds to help educate African-American education majors at nearby Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes for what are considered as his "minor" novels: his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Reivers, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955. On August 3, 1987, the United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in his honor.

Selected writings

Novels

• Soldiers' Pay (1926)
• Father Abraham (written 1926–27, published 1983)
• Mosquitoes (1927)
• Sartoris/Flags in the Dust (1929/1973)
• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• As I Lay Dying (1930)
• Sanctuary (1931)
• Light in August (1932)
• Pylon (1935)
• Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
• The Unvanquished (1938)
• If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (The Wild Palms/Old Man) (1939)
• The Hamlet (1940)
• Go Down, Moses (1942), episodic novel made up of seven rewritten, previously published stories including "Pantaloon in Black", "The Old People", "The Bear", "Delta Autumn", and the titular story
• Intruder in the Dust (1948)
• Requiem for a Nun (1951)
• A Fable (1954)
• The Town (1957)
• The Mansion (1959)
• The Reivers (1962)

Short stories

• "Landing in Luck" (1919)
• "The Hill" (1922)
• "New Orleans"
• "Mirrors of Chartres Street" (1925)
• "Damon and Pythias Unlimited" (1925)
• "Jealousy" (1925)
• "Cheest" (1925)
• "Out of Nazareth" (1925)
• "The Kingdom of God" (1925)
• "The Rosary" (1925)
• "The Cobbler" (1925)
• "Chance" (1925)
• "Sunset" (1925)
• "The Kid Learns" (1925)
• "The Liar" (1925)
• "Home" (1925)
• "Episode" (1925)
• "Country Mice" (1925)
• "Yo Ho and Two Bottles of Rum" (1925)
• "Music - Sweeter than the Angels Sing"
• "A Rose for Emily" (1930)
• "Honor" (1930)
• "Thrift" (1930)
• "Red Leaves" (1930)
• "Ad Astra" (1931)
• "Dry September" (1931)
• "That Evening Sun" (1931)
• "Hair" (1931)
• "Spotted Horses" (1931)
• "The Hound" (1931)
• "Fox Hunt" (1931)
• "Carcassonne" (1931)
• "Divorce in Naples" (1931)
• "Victory" (1931)
• "All the Dead Pilots" (1931)
• "Crevasse" (1931) "Mistral" (1931)
• "A Justice" (1931)
  • "Dr. Martino" (1931) "Idyll in the Desert" (1931)
• "Miss Zilphia Gant" (1932)
• "Death Drag" (1932)
• "Centaur in Brass" (1932)
• "Once Aboard the Lugger (I)" (1932)
• "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" (1932)
• "Turnabout" (1932)
• "Smoke" (1932)
• "Mountain Victory" (1932)
• "There Was a Queen" (1933)
• "Artist at Home" (1933)
• "Beyond" (1933)
• "Elly" (1934)
• "Pennsylvania Station" (1934)
• "Wash" (1934)
• "A Bear Hunt" (1934) "The Leg" (1934) "Black Music" (1934) "Mule in the Yard" (1934) "Ambuscade" (1934) "Retreat" (1934) "Lo!" (1934) "Raid" (1934) "Skirmish at Sartoris" (1935) "Golden Land" (1935) "That Will Be Fine" (1935) "Uncle Willy" (1935) "Lion" (1935) "The Brooch" (1936) "Two Dollar Wife" (1936) "Fool About a Horse" (1936) "Vendee" (1936) "Monk" (1937) "Barn Burning" (1939) "Hand Upon the Waters" (1939) "A Point of Law" (1940) "The Old People" (1940) "Pantaloon in Black" (1940) "Gold Is Not Always" (1940) "Tomorrow" (1940), adapted to film in 1972 "The Tall Men" (1941) "Two Soldiers" (1942), adapted to film in 2003 "Delta Autumn" (1942) "The Bear" (novella) (1942)

"Afternoon of a Cow" (1943) "Shingles for the Lord" (1943) "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek" (1943) "Shall Not Perish" (1943) "Appendix, Compson, 1699-1945" (1946) "An Error in Chemistry" (1946) "A Courtship" (1948) "Knight's Gambit" (1949) "Nobel Prize Award Speech" (1949) "A Name for the City" (1950) "Notes on a Horsethief" (1951) "Mississippi" (1954) "Sepulture South: Gaslight" (1954) "Race at Morning" (1955) "By the People" (1955) "Hell Creek Crossing" (1962) "Mr. Acarius" (1965) "The Wishing Tree" (1967) "Al Jackson" (1971) "And Now What's To Do" (1973) "Nympholepsy" (1973) "The Priest" (1976) "Mayday" (1977) "Frankie and Johnny" (1978) "Don Giovanni" (1979) "Peter" (1979) "A Portrait of Elmer" (1979) "Adolescence" (1979) "Snow" (1979) "Moonlight" (1979) "With Caution and Dispatch" (1979) "Hog Pawn" (1979) "A Dangerous Man" (1979) "A Return" (1979) "The Big Shot" (1979) "Once Aboard the Lugger (II)" (1979) "Dull Tale" (1979) "Evangeline" (1979) "Love" (1988) "Christmas Tree" (1995) "Rose of Lebanon" (1995) "Lucas Beauchamp" (1999)

Poetry

Vision in Spring (1921) The Marble Faun (1924) A Green Bough (1933) This Earth, a Poem (1932) Mississippi Poems (1979) Helen, a Courtship and Mississippi Poems (1981).

Audio recordings The William Faulkner Audio Collection. Caedmon, 2003. Five hours on five discs includes Faulkner reading his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech and excerpts from As I Lay Dying, The Old Man and A Fable, plus readings by Debra Winger ("A Rose for Emily", "Barn Burning"), Keith Carradine ("Spotted Horses") and Arliss Howard ("That Evening Sun", "Wash"). Winner of AudioFile Earphones

Award .
William Faulkner Reads: The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Selections from As I Lay Dying, A Fable, The Old Man. Caedmon/Harper Audio, 1992. Cassette. ISBN 1-55994-572-9 William Faulkner Reads from His Work. Arcady Series, MGM E3617 ARC, 1957. Faulkner reads from The Sound and The Fury (side one) and Light in August (side two). Produced by Jean Stein, who also did the liner notes with Edward Cole. Cover photograph by Robert Capa (Magnum). From 1957–1958, William Faulkner was the University of Virginia's Writer in Residence (the first). There are audio recordings of his time at the University of Virginia, and they have now been made available online at Faulkner at Virginia

William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on his own native Lafayette County.[1] Faulkner is considered one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.[2] Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), both won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were 1930's As I Lay Dying and Light in August (1932).

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons to Murry Cuthbert Faulkner (August 17, 1870 – August 7, 1932) and Maud Butler (November 27, 1871 – October 19, 1960).[3] He had three younger brothers: Murry Charles "Jack" Faulkner (June 26, 1899 – December 24, 1975), author John Faulkner (September 24, 1901 – March 28, 1963) and Dean Swift Faulkner (August 15, 1907 – November 10, 1935). Faulkner was born and raised in, and heavily influenced by, his home state of Mississippi, as well as by the history and culture of the American South altogether. Only four days prior to his fifth birthday, the Faulkner family settled in Oxford, Mississippi on September 21, 1902,[3][4] where he resided on and off for the remainder of his life. Family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline Barr (the black woman who raised him from infancy) crucially influenced the development of his artistic imagination: both his mother and grandmother were great readers and also painters and photographers, educating him in visual language. His life-long education by Callie Barr is central to his novels' preoccupations with the politics of sexuality and race.[5] In adolescence, Faulkner began writing poetry almost exclusively. He did not write his first novel until 1925. His literary influences are deep and wide. He once stated that he modeled his early writing on the Romantic era in late 18th century and early 19th century in England.[3] He attended the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, and was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon social fraternity. He enrolled at Ole Miss in 1919, and attended three semesters before dropping out in November 1920.[6] The younger Faulkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of Black and White Americans, his characterization of Southern characters, and his timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people dwelling behind the façades of good old boys and simpletons. Unable to join the United States Army due to his height (he was 5' 5½"), Faulkner enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps, later training at RFC bases in Canada and Britain, yet never experienced wartime action during the First World War.[3][4] In 1918, upon enlisting in the RFC, Faulkner himself made the change to his surname from the original "Falkner". However, according to one story, a careless typesetter simply made an error. When the misprint appeared on the title page of his first book, Faulkner was asked whether he wanted a change. He supposedly replied, "Either way suits me."[7] Although Faulkner is heavily identified with Mississippi, he was residing in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay,[3] after being directly influenced by Sherwood Anderson to attempt fiction writing. The miniature house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans is now the premises of Faulkner House Books, where it also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.[citation needed] Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville from February to June 1957 and again in 1958.[8] He suffered serious injuries in a horse-riding accident in 1959, and died from a myocardial infarction, aged 64, on July 6, 1962, at Wright's Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.[3][4] He is buried along with his family in St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford, along with a family friend with the mysterious initials E.T.

William Faulkner /ˈfɔːlknɚ/ (nacido William Cuthbert Falkner, 'New Albany, Misisipi, 25 de septiembre de 1897 - Byhalia, 6 de julio de 1962) fue un narrador y poeta estadounidense. En sus obras destacan el drama psicológico y la profundidad emocional, utilizó para ello una larga y serpenteada prosa, además de un léxico meticuloso. Ganador del Nobel de Literatura de 1949.

Fue considerado rival estilístico de Ernest Hemingway (sus largas frases contrastaban con las cortas de Hemingway) y es considerado uno de los principales modernista estadounidenses de la década de 1930, siguiendo la tradición experimental de escritores europeos como James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust y Franz Kafka y conocido por su uso de técnicas literarias innovadoras, como el monólogo interior, la inclusión de múltiples narradores o puntos de vista y los saltos en el tiempo dentro de la narración.

Su influencia es notoria en la generación de escritores hispanoamericanos de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. García Márquez en su Vivir para contarla y Vargas Llosa en El pez en el agua admiten su influencia en la narrativa.

Biografía

Nació en New Albany, Misisipi, aunque se crió en las cercanías de Oxford, lugar al que se trasladó la familia en 1902. Era el mayor de cuatro hermanos de una familia tradicional sureña formada por Murry Cuthbert Falkner (1870-1932) y Maud Butler (1871-1960). Estuvo muy influido por su estado natal, así como por el ambiente general del Sur. Misisipi marcó su sentido del humor y mantuvo una fuerte presencia a lo largo de toda su obra, en la que el carácter típico sureño, fue una constante, y que junto a la atemporalidad de sus temas, marcarían la base de todas sus recreaciones literarias.

En 1915 dejó los estudios y empezó a trabajar en el banco de su abuelo. Durante la I Guerra Mundial ingresó como piloto de la RAF (Real Fuerza Aérea Británica). Cuando regresó a su ciudad, entró como veterano en la Universidad de Misisipi, aunque volvió a abandonar los estudios: esta vez fue para dedicarse a escribir. Durante esa época realizó trabajos como pintor de techos, o cartero en la Universidad de Misisipi (de donde lo echaron por su costumbre de leer revistas antes de entregarlas), y publicó su primer y único libro de poemas: The Marble Faun (1924).

A partir de 1921 Faulkner trabajó como periodista en Nueva Orleans y conoció al escritor de cuentos estadounidense Sherwood Anderson, que le ayudó a encontrar un editor para su primera novela, La paga de los soldados (1926).

Pasó una temporada de viaje por Europa y a su regreso comenzó a escribir una serie de novelas ambientadas en el condado ficticio de Yoknapatawpha (inspirado en el condado de Lafayette, Misisipi), donde transcurren gran parte de sus escritos, y del cual hace una descripción geográfica y traza un mapa en ¡Absalón, Absalón! (1936). Allí puso a vivir a 6298 blancos y 9313 negros, como pretexto para presentar personajes característicos del grupo sudista arruinado del cual era arquetipo su propia familia. La primera de estas novelas es Sartoris (1929), en la que identificó al coronel Sartoris con su propio bisabuelo, William Cuthbert Faulkner, soldado, político, constructor ferroviario y escritor. Después aparece El ruido y la furia (1929), que confirmó su madurez creativa y da comienzo a su etapa más fértil desde el punto de vista artístico.

En general, la crítica identifica El ruido y la furia, Mientras agonizo (1930), Luz de agosto (1932), ¡Absalón, Absalón! y El villorrio (1940) como sus novelas más importantes. El periodo más inspirado de la obra de Faulkner se cierra con la colección de cuentos Desciende, Moisés (1942), que incluye una de sus máximas creaciones, el cuento largo "El oso".

En 1929 contrajo matrimonio con Estelle Oldham, decidió establecer su casa y fijar su residencia literaria en el pequeño pueblo de Oxford.

A pesar de la buena aceptación de los lectores de sus obras, tan sólo se vendió bien Santuario (1931). Sus temas del mal y la corrupción continúan siendo relevantes en la actualidad. La secuela del libro, Requiem for a Nun, es la única obra de teatro que publicó. La introducción es una única frase que abarca unas cuantas páginas. Debido al éxito de Santuario logró trabajo, bastante más lucrativo, como guionista de Hollywood.

En 1946 el crítico Malcolm Cowley, preocupado porque Faulkner era poco conocido y apreciado, publicó The Portable Faulkner, libro que reúne extractos de sus novelas en una secuencia cronológica.

Es considerado uno de los creadores de ficción más importantes de las letras del siglo XX, a la altura de Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka y James Joyce. Su influencia en la literatura radica tanto en aspectos técnicos (como su desarrollo del monólogo interior, el multiperspectivismo, la oralidad de la narración, un manejo no cronológico del tiempo en el relato) como temáticos (la decadencia de una familia, el fracaso, la creación de un territorio de ficción propio en el que radicar un ciclo de relatos, la obsesión con la historia, la combinación de localismo y universalidad). Faulkner influiría en gran medida en autores posteriores en español, como Juan Rulfo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan Benet, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan José Saer y Jorge Luis Borges (traductor de Las palmeras salvajes al castellano).

Faulkner, que arrastró problemas con el alcohol durante gran parte de su vida, siguió escribiendo tanto novelas como cuentos hasta su muerte en Byhalia, el 6 de julio de 1962, a causa de un infarto de miocardio. Sus restos están inhumados en el Oxford Memorial Cemetery, en Oxford, en el sepulcro familiar.