Short Biography of William Faulkner

Born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897, William Cuthbert Faulkner was a prolific American writer whose literary genius resulted in many novels, short stories and poetry. The protean nature of his literary output is in itself a testament to his fecund imagination as a writer whose prolific contribution can also be measured in terms of the many huge recognitions he received in the form of Nobel Prize in Literature, and the two Booker Prizes in his lifetime. With a vast and varied corpus of literary works that he wrote and published, much of which he produced in the 1920s and the 1930s, the years of Southern renaissance, he defined the lineaments of what is known as Southern literature with its own distinctive topoi. In all, he transposes the racial concerns of the Deep South in which the latter is deeply implicated with its long and complex history of prosperity and violence, onto the imaginary landscape of Yoknapatawpha. This fictive topography then becomes the Faulknerian site whereupon he explores questions of race and gender among other things.

In his role as a writer, his expansive imagination was not untouched by the social and political realities of his day and age. Consequently, he transformed the lived realities of a Southern life that he witnessed from so close, and also knew through an association with his African American nanny, Caroline Barr, into materials for his fiction. In and through a fictive universe of his own creation, he would explore the processes of racialization, and its reinforcement in everyday practices, and the ways in which racial prejudice and sexism fueled a system of injustice, exploitation and vigilantism.

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