Because Soldiers’ Pay was not successful commercially, Faulkner again was forced to find employment. This time, however, he found an ideal job: He shipped out as a deck hand on a freighter bound for Europe, where he spent many weeks loafing about the Mediterranean, especially in France and in Italy. His own imaginative reports of his life abroad have never been corroborated.
In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham Franklin, a high-school sweetheart who had been married previously, and he began a period of serious writing. Over the next few years, three of his greatest novels-The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932)-were published. Despite his numerous publications, however, he still did not earn enough money to support his and Estelle’s lifestyle. In 1933, a daughter, Jill, was born, and by the mid-1930s, Faulkner was deeply troubled with debt: In addition to his own family and servants, he supported his brother Dean’s children after Dean died in a plane crash, in a plane Faulkner had bought for him.
Mounting financial problems forced Faulkner to publish short stories as quickly as he could, and he finally capitulated to the monetary rewards of working as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a thousand dollars a week. He hated the work, but he returned to it off and on during the 1930s, working long enough to pay off his significant debts, and then returning to Oxford, where he wrote at least three novels—Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Wild Palms (1939), and The Hamlet (1940), in addition to several short stories.
Despite Faulkner’s having produced some of the finest twentieth-century novels, his early works were never commercial successes; the exception is Sanctuary (1931), at first thought to be a sensational potboiler but later viewed otherwise. He struggled financially until the 1948 publication of Intruder in the Dust. The novel was made into a movie, filmed in Oxford, and Faulkner found himself an important figure in and around the town, the same town that earlier had spurned him, calling him such names as “Count No ‘Count.”
When Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949, only one of his novels was in print. Almost overnight, he was acclaimed by critics, writers, teachers, and reporters. From being an obscure, backwoods country writer, he was catapulted suddenly to the highest echelons of literary achievement. He took advantage of this newfound acclaim by encouraging young writers not to quit their craft. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he seized the spotlight of worldwide attention “as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.”
In 1957, Faulkner accepted a position as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. There, in informal class settings, he answered many questions about his novels and his artistic vision. Although he sometimes confused aspects of one novel with another, his answers attest to his characters’ vibrant personalities and expand on his panoramic vision for the Yoknapatawpha saga.
In June 1962, Faulkner was thrown from his horse and injured his back. He suffered intense pain and was admitted to Wright’s Sanitarium, in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 5. The next day—ironically the date of the old Colonel’s birthday—he died, leaving behind him a body of work unsurpassed in twentieth-century literature.
Faulkner uses new techniques to express man’s position in the modern world. The complexity of his narrative structures mirrors the complex lives we lead. Most of his novels and short stories probe into the mores and morals of the South, which he was not hesitant to criticize. In his early fiction, Faulkner views despairingly man’s position in the universe. He briefly voices this same sense of futility and defeat in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” Man is a weak creature incapable of rising above his selfish needs.
In his latter works, however, Faulkner’s tone changes, and he emphasizes humankind’s survival. He believes human beings to be potentially great, affirming that “man shall not only endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” Penetrating deeply the psychological motivations for human beings’ actions, Faulkner concludes that hope remains for our salvation from despair.
