The South Didn't Always Appreciate Its Greatest Writer: The Story of William Faulkner

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See BoostInfinite.com for terms and conditions. And we return to Our American Stories. Up next, we'll bring you the story of the novelist famous around the world for his story set in the fictional Yaknapatawka County, which is based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, the town the author William Faulkner grew up in. And we broadcast right here from that county in the town of Oxford, Mississippi. Rachel Hudson of Roanoke, William Faulkner's home that is open to the public as a museum, brings us the story of this introverted, interesting man. William Faulkner is, I think, the reason why Southern literature is such a popular genre even for today. He was one of the first Southern writers to write about a modern South, kind of straying away from this gone-with-the-wind South and focusing on how the South is healing and growing from the Civil War and how it's evolving during the turn of the 20th century. It's interesting that William Faulkner grew up in Mississippi, lived in Mississippi, and wrote about Mississippi. So many Southern authors tend to reflect on where they're from after leaving the South.

That seems to be a common thing. But Faulkner knew that there was just something special about his native soil, as he said here in Mississippi. He was a private person.

He may have been a binge drinker. But he was revolutionary when it came to Southern lit. Faulkner is a Mississippian down to the bone. He was born in New Albany, Mississippi, which is about 20 to 30 miles outside of Oxford. He grew up there for a kind of short time because he moved to Oxford with his family when he was five years old. He was always the artsy kid.

He's the oldest brother of three younger brothers. He really was close to his mom growing up because she was also an artist. She always encouraged little bills or billies, as he was called when he was a kid, encouraged his artistic ambitions.

His mother was a painter. He didn't love school growing up. I think he just kind of always had a problem with authority a little bit. He never even finished high school and he only went to Ole Miss long enough to join a fraternity. And then he shortly dropped out after that.

I'm pretty sure he got a C or a D in English, too. So he was he was never the greatest student. He was always wanting to be more self-taught and kind of going his own path.

So he didn't rely on school. He also he loved hunting. He loved telling ghost stories.

He loved hanging out with his brothers. And he was just a true blue Mississippi kid who had kind of bigger dreams. He actually first started out trying to be a poet early on. And he even went off like a lot of writers in that time. He went off to Paris in the 20s to, you know, gain inspiration and kind of be among that slew of artists at the time.

But he kind of realized that the true potential for his writing was in the place that he had always known, in the place he'd always grown up in, which was Mississippi. Faulkner never gave an honest answer to the addition of the U in his name question, because originally it's spelled F-A-L-K-N-E-R. But the first appearance of the U in Faulkner, Faulkner wanted to join the Royal Air Force up in Canada. He was too short to fly for the U.S. Army, so he went up to Canada to join the British Royal Air Force. And before doing that, he added a U to the spelling this last name because he thought it would make him more of a convincing British guy.

So that's the kind of first time anyone ever saw him spelling his name that way. It was when he went up to join the British Royal Air Force during the First World War. But by the time he got there to the training camp and everything, the war ended pretty soon after. So he never even saw combat. But he nonetheless came back to Oxford, Mississippi with a U in his name and somehow acquired a British Royal Air Force uniform.

And I had these medals and things on there, which he never even attained himself. And he also would kind of affect the British accent and tell these war stories of, you know, when he was a barnstormer in France and how he has a metal plate in his head because of an accident and stuff like that. So he was just he never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And he also at some point said that his first publisher misspelled his name, misspelled it by adding the U. But he self-published his first novel. So he was his first publisher. And then pretty much any family member who wanted to be associated with his novels spelled it with the U.

And those who didn't kept it with just the A. His first novel was 1926. It was called Soldier's Pay. So he still had not reached any sort of commercial success at that point. Before that, you know, the first thing he'd ever published was a volume of poetry. But the first kind of serious stab at a novel on his part was The Sound and the Fury.

And that was around, I think, 27 or 28. His publisher thought it was a nightmare novel. And he's like, I can't publish this.

You know, you got to do something about this. But he just kind of continued to tell him, like, no, this is this is what I'm doing. And he started creating the world of Yoknapatawha, which is the name of his fictional county in which pretty much the majority of his novels take place. I mean, just typical Faulkner, he chooses something that's very difficult to pronounce. So the name Yoknapatawha is a Chickasaw Indian word. And it really just means river, because not far from Oxford is a Yokna River, which is where that inspiration came from.

So the name of itself means river. But it is the name of the fictional county that Faulkner's novels took place in. And it's basically just a fictionalized version of Lafayette County and the fictionalized version of Oxford within that world of his is a town called Jefferson. He definitely wasn't popular with the townsfolk. They were not happy about what he was writing about.

They even called him Count No Count because they were just thinking, who is this guy? Who does he think he is, you know, living in that old mansion and writing about us? And he would fictionalize the names, of course. But it was pretty obvious to a lot of the Oxford people who he was writing about. And he definitely struggled with drinking, too. And that's something that the town and a lot of people still kind of, you know, identify him as just an alcoholic writer. But, you know, Faulkner, he never really had to drink in order to write. He didn't do the typical thing where people say, write drunk, edit sober. That wasn't that really wasn't how Faulkner operated.

I mean, how could he? He was producing a novel like every year there for a time, so required a lot of dedication and can't be drinking on the job with that. But he definitely was kind of seen as just this introverted alcoholic guy. But he was he's much more than that. He was postmaster at the University of Mississippi for a brief period while he was, you know, trying to kick off his career. And he was actually threatened to be fired from that position because he was so terrible at it.

He wasn't sending anybody's mail. He was in the back trying to write his books. And so they threatened to fire him and to beat him to the punch. Faulkner wrote a resignation letter for his postmaster position where it read that he'll be at the beck and call people with money his whole life, but he'll be damned if he's ever at the beck and call of any S.O.B.

with two cents to buy a stamp. So that's that was like the last non writing job he had after that postmaster position. He definitely was a full time writer. He was he was never really good at anything else besides writing. So we have that resignation letter of his postmaster position on display at Roanoke, alongside, ironically, his own commemorative stamp, which was made in the 80s.

And as far as we know, Faulkner is the only postmaster to have been fired and later receive his own stamp with his face on it. And you've been listening to Rachel Hudson of Roanoke, William Faulkner's home, that is now a museum right here in Oxford, Mississippi, where we broadcast about an hour south of Memphis. And what a story you're hearing.

Always the artsy kid. He really never finishes high school, drops out of Ole Miss, gets a C in English while he's there. And in the end, loves what Southern boys love, a stint in Paris. But he comes back to Mississippi. Some writers escape to write about the South. He comes home to write about his home. And he was not a drinker with a writing problem.

He was a writer with a drinking problem. When we come back, more of the story of William Faulkner here on Our American Stories. Or see the new Bronco or Bronco Sport and think, what that thing needs is an off-road dirt bath. Because Built Ford Proud is more than just a set of words. It's a pact between us, our drivers, and what we can do together.

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Only at Metro. And we continue with our American stories and with the story of William Faulkner, told by Rachel Hudson of Roanoke, Faulkner's home-turned museum. It's open to the public right here in Oxford, Mississippi, where we broadcast. Let's return to the story of William Faulkner. Roanoke was Faulkner's house for 32 years. It originally was built in 1844 for an Irish immigrant from Tennessee named Colonel Robert Sheegog. It wasn't called Roanoke originally.

It was called the Sheegog place or the home place. It's a Greek Revival style home sitting on four acres of grounds. It was never a plantation when the Sheegogs were there, but rather just a residence for them in the new settlement of Oxford in the 1840s. But the house was actually abandoned for seven years until Faulkner bought it in 1930. So it was a totally dilapidated southern mansion and he was a struggling writer.

So what better way to start off your career than to get in some debt and buy a fixer-upper? I mean, he was just always kind of drawn to the contradictions of the South. He was writing about these issues of how the South is healing from the Civil War and healing from the atrocities of slavery, but all the while decides to buy an antebellum home and kind of live among that contradiction. But he renamed Roanoke after two different types of trees. The Roan tree, he said, was to symbolize peace and security, and then the live oak was to symbolize strength and solitude.

But neither of those have ever even been on the property at all. And there's no such thing as a Roanoke tree. Faulkner just liked to basically shame everybody for their lack of woodcraft knowledge if they asked him where the Roanoke was.

And he could just laugh and give you this whole extrapolated meaning of the name and all of that. Faulkner married his wife Estelle in 1929, though Estelle was actually married before Faulkner. She and Faulkner were high school sweethearts, and they were engaged to an extent.

But Estelle's parents did not approve of Faulkner because he was an aspiring writer, and they thought that was just a poor career choice. So Estelle married a lawyer instead, a guy named Cornell Franklin. She was married to him for 10 years, had two children, and she actually spent her first marriage mostly in Shanghai. Her husband was on the municipal court in Shanghai, so they were there for 10 years.

So she came home to Mississippi on vacation with her two children and just never returned to China. So then that led to Estelle and Cornell's divorce. And then a year later, Estelle and William Faulkner married.

When Faulkner bought Roanoke, Estelle moved in with him, and then they eventually had a daughter together named Jill. It was tough for any writer, really. So he was doing it the hard way. He didn't have any schooling, and he was writing these novels, which for a lot of people, they were kind of unreadable. And then he needed to make some money because it was starting to run low, and then he made the brilliant idea of buying a dilapidated southern mansion. So that's when Hollywood kind of fit in there as a screenwriter.

He had been kind of back and forth between Beverly Hills and Oxford because he was a screenwriter for MGM for about a decade. He was making $1,000 a week, so that was what he needed at the time to make all these necessary renovations and to continue his writing. And he also was constantly writing short stories to get those published, because those were a quicker means of making money than slaving away on a novel.

So if it weren't for the screenwriting job and producing the short stories, I'm not sure how he would have made it as just a novelist at that time. We have about 90% of William Faulkner's furniture on display in the rooms, including his typewriter and part of the air conditioning unit that his wife Estelle added to her room the day after Faulkner's funeral, because he refused to have air conditioning in the house when he lived there. He kind of refused to have any sort of what he called modern technology in the house. But really that just meant TV, radio, and air conditioning, because his daughter Jill had a radio in her room, and that was the only radio ever in Roanoke.

But other modern technologies were totally fine with Faulkner, like a brand new Frigidaire he got in the 50s, an electric stovetop, a lawnmower, a biplane, all these other modern things. He just had a very heavy stance on no TV, no radio, and no air conditioning. By 1930, he had written a best-selling novel called Sanctuary, which helped him reach a little bit more commercial success. He sold the rights to Sanctuary for a movie adaptation, and he wrote Sanctuary with the intention of it being a potboiler, to kind of shock the public and gain revenue, and that's exactly what it did. There's a myth regarding the writing process of As L.A.

Dying. Not so much myth. I mean, it's definitely based on some truth in the way that he wrote it so fast, within just like a month or two to finish the novel. When he was writing As L.A. Dying, he was working at the University of Mississippi power plant at the night shift there, and supposedly he wrote kind of the first drafts of As L.A. Dying on an upside-down wheelbarrow during his night shift at the University powerhouse.

And As L.A. Dying is another kind of quintessential Faulkner. It's a tour de force novel, for sure. It grapples with class in Mississippi and how people of lower class deal with death, but supposedly he wrote it on the back of a wheelbarrow during his powerhouse night shift. So really, after the Second World War is when Faulkner's novels were being printed more and read more often, because the introduction of paperback novels really started picking up all over the world, and he started getting a lot more international acclaim. There's folks realizing that non-Americans read more American fiction than they did. And also, he got a little bit of acclaim by writing a few original screenplays.

A couple notable ones of those are The Big Sleep, which is an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel, To Have and Have Not, and a few others, but those kind of relations in Hollywood kind of helped his novel's success as well. And he also was just a prolific short story writer, too, so he was always trying to get those in the Saturday Evening Post, and eventually that just kind of got eyes on it. And you're listening to Rachel Hudson of Roanoke, Faulkner's home-turned-museum.

It's open right here in Oxford, Mississippi, where we broadcast, about an hour south of Memphis. And you've been hearing about how William Faulkner, at least in the 20s, 30s, and even 40s, had to do other things to make a living. He'd written The Sound and the Fury, one of his classics, one of the greats in American literature, but people weren't buying novels like they would later with the advent of the paperback and the international trade. He was making his primary dollars from screenwriting and from short stories. And even when he wrote As I Lie Dying, he was working on the night shift at the Mississippi power plant and still knocked that one out in a month or two.

So come back, the story of William Faulkner, one of America's great writers and hometown hero here in Oxford, Mississippi, here on Our American Stories. Pro football player Travis Kelsey is pressed for time during the football season, so he does two things at once. Whether it's grilling while mowing. Two things at once! Or getting this season's updated COVID-19 shot at the same visit as his flu shot.

Two things at once. You can be like Travis and ask your pharmacist about getting this season's COVID-19 shot at the same visit as your flu shot, if you're due for both, as recommended by the CDC. Learn more and schedule at VaxAssist.com. Sponsored by Pfizer. At Metro by T-Mobile, there's nada yada yada. That means no contracts, no price hikes, and no surprises. We don't even hide what the lawyers make us say.

We put it first. When we say no price hikes, we mean when you join Metro, your price will never increase for talk, texts, and smartphone data. Our own exclusions are for limited-time promos, free-of-charges, and third-party services. Nada yada yada means wireless without the gotcha.

Only at Metro. And we're back with our American stories and the story of William Faulkner, and now we'll pick up with the last part of this story, starting with a novel that took Faulkner 11 years to complete. Here again is Rachel Hudson of Roanoke. A fable was something Faulkner spent over a decade working on. He wrote the plot outline for it on the wall of his office in Roanoke. He originally tried writing the outline on paper and taping it to the wall in his office, but there was a big metal fan in there that kept blowing it off. So you just wrote it directly on the wall, and it takes place during Holy Week, during the First World War.

So each section of the novel is the day of the week, and those sections are represented on the wall in Faulkner's handwriting at Roanoke. A fable was something he spent 11 years writing. It was the first novel he wrote after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. It was kind of a departure from his Yoch Nepetafa series of novels. It didn't take place in that kind of familiar, fictionalized Mississippi landscape, but rather it was a religious allegory of Christ as a soldier during Holy Week, fighting the Germans in the First World War. Faulkner always had an affinity for war, for the First World War, the fact that he tried serving as a barnstormer, but didn't really go into combat. So I think he always kind of had this need to live out some sort of combative war experience in his novels. But a fable is really quite different from anything he had written before.

And like I said, it's the only one that he wrote the outline for on the wall. He was pretty revolutionary on how he addressed race in his fiction. He writes about class and how race and class kind of clash together, in particular the rise and fall of Southern aristocracy. And there's a family in Faulkner's novels called the Snopes who are representative of the lower white class in the South. And just no one was really writing about these kind of controversial things in Southern literature until Faulkner. It was the longest time it was, you know, the South in literature was still portrayed as like a Gone with the Wind-esque fantasy and a little bit more Southern gentry. And Faulkner was writing about the kind of nitty gritty stuff that he saw every day.

He called his inspiration, he said he was turning the actual into the apocryphal. People who lived here, they just hated them. In his novel, The Sound and the Fury, the family are the Compsons. And they're based almost pretty obviously on a family from Oxford named the Thompsons. And the Compson family kind of is Faulkner's rise and fall of upper class Southern families.

There's a character in The Sound and the Fury who kind of struggles with the disillusion that their family has any sort of reputation. And I think that's what Faulkner was, he was always just trying to take down the idea that there are these powerful families in the South. And they think they can operate how it was during, you know, the height of the South, Antebellum times and everything. And I think he's trying to suggest that, you know, that era of the South is over, it is gone. There's that kind of way cannot exist in the modern South and, you know, during the turn of the 20th century. That's really what was so revolutionary about him is because he didn't keep the South in this kind of romanticized past. He was really brought into modernity. And they only started caring about Faulkner a little bit because his novel Intruder in the Dust got adapted to a movie in 49.

And they filmed the movie in Oxford. And so everybody wanted to be an extra in Intruder in the Dust, regardless of how they felt about Count No Count, aka Faulkner. There's a photo of him at Roanoke from his niece's wedding and where the photographer, he has a caption on the photo and it's of Faulkner smiling. And the photographer says that it's the only happy expression he ever caught of his little friend. And it's funny, whenever people see that, they go, was he an unhappy guy? And no, I think he wasn't unhappy, but he did say that he never learned much from talking. He was he was just an artist and he was definitely an introvert and kind of reserved.

And I think always just kind of observing and sort of banking this knowledge and with the intent of using it later, like I think most artists do. But, you know, Faulkner is as shy as he maybe was or as introverted. He loved telling stories, especially to his nieces and nephews and his daughter. After he got some fame, too, in interviews, he would always make stuff up.

For instance, where the U came from. He never gave an honest answer because, you know, what's the truth in that? And he definitely was a very private person.

I think that was one of the intentions of buying this old house kind of secluded on the grounds and everything. He really craved his privacy. And at first he he hated the fame. And he's he's once said that on his epitaph, he wanted it to say that he wrote the books and he died.

He was always a very private person. I think Faulkner just he never was someone who sat down with a book and got cozy by the fire. You know, reading to him was was just as much of a job as writing was.

He took it seriously. And you can't really get cozied up with a Faulkner book too much. If you're reading it alone, it is quite a labor of love.

And you kind of second guess things sometimes. And I think that was the intent of his stuff was to kind of purposely challenge the reader and kind of challenge the way that people think about certain things and think about the South. It's funny, he he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and then and then got the Pulitzer Prize for a fable in 1950, I believe. And it's like what writers get the Nobel first and then a Pulitzer second like that's unheard of.

I think they think the Pulitzer were they gave him that award because they said, sorry, we didn't give this to you earlier. I love Faulkner's Nobel speech where he kind of wraps up the things he felt worth writing about, which he said, the only things worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. So he's always, you know, proud of his Southern history, but is able to critique it at the same time.

And if you can't kind of live with those contradictions of feeling and thought, then why why, you know, that's why he's a writer. After Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 49, he kind of felt the need to be more of a public figure. So for, you know, about a decade there, he was much more in the public light. There was a Ford Foundation documentary that was made of him. He went on a goodwill tour in South America, and he also visited Japan in the 50s.

And the Nobel really kind of made him an international figure. And he felt just more necessary to see the public and not be the, you know, secluded guy living out in Roanoke anymore. So the last kind of 10 odd years of his life was spent doing that.

And then in the late 50s, he was the writer in residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He really loved it up there. He really got into horse country. After his time in Charlottesville, he built a horse stable of his own on the grounds of Roanoke and spent a lot of time riding and jumping his horses, which would kind of eventually be the reason for his passing. He had taken a really bad fall off his horse in 1962.

And just two weeks after that horse fall, he went up to hospital in Byhalia and died of a heart attack because he never really sought proper medical treatment for that horse fall. But he was only 64 when he died. But those last, you know, decade of his life, he really was kind of soaking it in being this giant literary figure from all over the world. Faulkner is just so important to Southern literature. I mean, he really was the first one to really stamp in that genre.

I mean, there's countless others to kind of at the same time, like Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. You know, that kind of school of Southern literature is the reason why regionalism and Southern literature is so popular still today, just the genre in and of itself. And there's something unique about Mississippi, too, that I think people are drawn to.

And very few writers will write about their hometown while living in it for most of their life. That's another thing that makes Faulkner so unique. And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Madison Derricotte and a special thanks to Rachel Hudson of Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home that is open to the public as a museum right here in Oxford, Mississippi, about an hour south of Memphis. And we broadcast here in Oxford, Mississippi, and some great points Rachel made. Faulkner wrote about race differently than most writers, especially about race and class and the fall of the Southern aristocracy.

He turned the actual into the apocryphal, Rachel said, and he didn't keep the South in some romanticized past. The Nobel Prize winning, Pulitzer Prize winning hero of Oxford, the literary lion of the South, and an entire literary genre. Story of William Faulkner here on Our American Stories. Pro football player Travis Kelsey is pressed for time during the football season, so he does two things at once. Whether it's grilling while mowing. Two things at once! Or getting this season's updated COVID-19 shot at the same visit as his flu shot. Two things at once.

You can be like Travis and ask your pharmacist about getting this season's COVID-19 shot at the same visit as your flu shot, if you're due for both, as recommended by the CDC. Learn more and schedule at VaxAssist.com. Sponsored by Pfizer. You're at a place you just discovered, and being an American Express Platinum card member with global dining access by Resi helped you score tickets to quite the dining experience. Okay, Chef. You're looking at something you've never seen before, much less tasted. After your first bite, you say, nothing, because you're speechless.

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