The Journey begins: the Story of William Faulkner

William Faulkner was born September 25, 1897 in New Albany Mississippi. From the beginning he was both intelligent and cunning. He grew up in Oxford. Mississippi, the oldest of four brothers. He tried to join the US Air force, but did not make it. He did train for the British Air force in Toronto, but never actually flew because the war ended before he could. He lied about serving in the war, even faking injuries, and attended the University of Mississippi on a scholarship for veterans, even though he never even graduated high school. Honestly, the more I know about Faulkner, the more I like him. His life sounds like a movie. His high school sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, accepted a proposal from another man, thinking that it was a joke because he was going to live in Hawaii. When she got the ring in the mail, she realized it was not a joke, and her parents made her marry him. But several years later, Faulkner and Oldham did marry in June 1929, a month after she divorced her husband.
Faulkner is a paradox. I read stories of his alcohol dependency and his lazy days working in the post office, yet he was able to write and publish so much during the time that he was alive. Some of his most well known books are As I lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Sanctuary. In his novels, his Southern roots and sense of family and clearly shown. Many of his writings he claimed to do just to make money, such as the book that made him famous, Sanctuary. He was a man of great compassion, taking care of his niece and sister in law after the death of his brother. But he was also a man of passion, and had an affair with his secretary in 1936 (and a little bit of a cliche) as his marriage to Estelle began to fall apart. He not only wrote books and short stories, but 1932 marked the year of his screenwriting career, which he did for financial reasons and actually hated the job. He would often go on day long drinking binges, where he could become delirious. His daughter, Jill, once asked him to stop and think of her before he drank, but he replied "No one remembers Shakespeare's kids."
He lived an unapologetic life, once he even insulted Hemingway's writing, to which he half apologized for. He also lived a very private life, and hide from the attention that he received after Sanctuary was published. But when he won the Nobel Peace Prize for literature in 1950, he became a public figure. He used his fame for good, when he moderately supported school integration in the 1950s. Faulkner was his own man. He disagreed with Southern segregation, yet he also disagreed with government involvement, which isolated himself from the North.  He continued to be active for the rest of his life. He died 12 years later in 1962 of a heart attack, but he accomplished something magnificent in his life: he was able to see his work appreciated and his legacy live on. He lived the life of an artist.