# data[].attributes.body
Southern gothic-
this particular story has a moody and forbidding atmosphere like the crumbling old mansion.
-

Macabre and Grotesque

Social Issues

Violence

Southern Setting

Decay

Isolation

Crime

Elements of strange

In an about the American south

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
William Faulkner at the University of Virginia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
His place as one of the great writers of the 20th century firmly established, William Faulkner accepted an invitation in 1957 from U.Va.'s English department to come to the University as writer-in-residence. Faulkner's appointment was cause for excitement among students and faculty, though the winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature initially caught Virginians off guard.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Now I realise for the first time," wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the vantage point of his mid-fifties, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don't know where it came from. I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel."

The disbelief Faulkner lays claim to is a little disingenuous. For the kind of writer he wanted to be, he had all the education, even all the book-learning, he needed. As for company, he stood to gain more from garrulous oldsters with gnarled hands and long memories than from effete littérateurs. Nevertheless, a measure of astonishment is in order. Who would have guessed that a boy of no great intellectual distinction from small-town Mississippi would become not only a famous writer, celebrated at home and abroad, but the kind of writer he in fact became: the most radical innovator in the annals of American fiction, a writer to whom the avant-garde of Europe and Latin America would go to school?

Of formal education Faulkner certainly had a minimum. He dropped out of high school in his junior year (his parents seem not to have made a fuss), and though he briefly attended the University of Mississippi, that was only by grace of a dispensation for returned servicemen (of Faulkner's war service, more below). His college record was undistinguished: a semester of English (grade: D), two semesters of French and Spanish. For this explorer of the mind of the post-bellum South, no courses in history; for the novelist who would weave Bergsonian time into the syntax of memory, no studies in philosophy or psychology.

What the rather dreamy Billy Faulkner gave himself in place of schooling was a narrow but intense reading of fin-de-siècle English poetry, notably Swinburne and Housman, and of three novelists who had given birth to fictional worlds lively and coherent enough to supplant the real one: Balzac, Dickens, and Conrad. Add to this a familiarity with the cadences of the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and Moby-Dick, and, a few years later, a quick study of what his older contemporaries T.S. Eliot and James Joyce were up to, and he was ready armed. As for materials, what he heard around him in Oxford, Mississippi, turned out to be more than enough: the epic, told and retold endlessly, of the South, a story of cruelty and injustice and hope and disappointment and victimization and resistance.

Billy Faulkner had barely quit school when the First World War broke out. Captivated by the idea of becoming a pilot and flying sorties against the Hun, he applied in 1918 to be taken into the Royal Air Force. Desperate for fresh manpower, the RAF sent him to Canada on a training...

This is exclusive content for subscribers only - subscribe at this low introductory rate for immediate access! Subscribe for $1 an Issue
Unlock this article, and thousands more from our complete 55+ year archive, by subscribing at the low introductory rate of just $1 an issue - that's 10 digital issues plus six months of full archive access plus the NYR App for just $10.

If you are already a subscriber, please be sure you are logged in to your nybooks.com account.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1. "Now I realise for the first time," wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the vantage point of his mid-fifties, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
William Faulkner - Two Time Pullitzer Prize Winner & Poet-Novelist of Mississippi | Mini Bio | BIO

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-william-faulkner-tackled-race-and-freed-the-south-from-itself.html

# data[].attributes.body
Who: William Faulkner was an American writer and Noble prize winner.

Where: From Oxford, Mississippi.

When: William was born on September 25, 1897 and died on July 6, 1962.

What: Faulkner wrote novels, short stories (which he is primarily known for), a play, poetry, essays and screenplays.

Why: Faulkner was driven to write for the need of money.