William Faulkner 威廉 福克纳.docx

1、William Faulkner 威廉 福克纳 William Faulkner 威廉 福克纳（1897-1962） William Faulkner ranks with Ernest Hemingway as one of the leading American authors of the Twentieth Century. Faulkner, like Robert Frost, was a regionalist, who spent most of his life in a small, particular area of the United States, writin

2、g about the scenes and people he knew best. Faulkners region was the Deep South, with its bitter history of slavery, civil war and destruction. He invented a county and a town in his imagination very similar to his own part of Mississippi, and he wrote about the society in the South by inventing fam

3、ilies which represented different social forces: the old, decaying upper class; the rising, ambitious, unscrupulous class of “poor whites”; and the Negroes who labored for both of them. Most of his stories take place in this imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, and concern members of the same families at

4、 different times in history. 他的多数故事都发生在他构想的Yoknapatawpha县，他笔下的人物不是一次写完，同一人物会在几本书中，在不同历史时期反复出现。这显然加深了人物的开掘，使其具有历史的深广度。 His Life. William Faulkner was born in the Deep South, the oldest of four brothers. His father was the business manager for the State University in Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkne

5、r spent most of his life. His family came from the old, white upper class. Though in decline in the 20th century, the family retained some of the old customs. Falkner was brought up by a black nurse whom he called Mammie Cally, who told him many stories remembered from the time of slavery. Faulkner

6、was an imaginative boy. There was no public library in Oxford, but there were plenty of English classics at home, which he read at random. He disliked school and dropped out after two years of high school. The people of Oxford considered him a wastrel. (a wasteful or worthless person) Two neighbors

7、had a decisive influence on him. He fell in love with a young neighbor named Estelle, and, hoping to get married one day, he took a respectable job in a bank. Another neighbor, Philip Stone （菲尔，斯多）, found young Faulkner unusually intelligent, and took charge of his reading. Stone gave him books whic

8、h were unknown in Oxford, Mississippi, including the 19th Century French symbolist writers who had deeply influenced Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Faulkner taught himself to read French at night, while he worked in the bank by day. In 1918, when Faulkner was 21 years old, Estelle married another man an

9、d went to live in Asia. Heartbroken, Faulkner left Mississippi and enlisted in the Canadian Air Force, hoping to fight in the First World War. However, the war ended before he had finished his basic training in Toronto. He went home and restlessly worked at one job after another, writing poems in hi

10、s spare time. He ended up as the postmaster (person in charge of a post office) in his hometown of Oxford. His neighbor Mr. Stone encouraged him to keep writing, and even supplied the money to get the poems published. In 1925, he took a job with a newspaper in New Orleans, the most important city in

11、 the South at that time. He joined a literary circle which centered around Sherwood Anderson, and with Andersons encouragement he wrote his first novel (Soldiers Pay 1926), about a wounded air force pilot. Anderson arranged to get the novel published and Faulkner, like nearly every other young Ameri

12、can writer in the 1920s, then made his way to Paris. He was vey lonely there, however, and when he received the first money from the sale of his novel, he bought a ticket home. The novel was not popular, and Faulkner did not make much money from it. Back in Mississippi, he worked once again at many

13、different jobs while he wrote a second novel in his spare time. (Mosquitoes, 1927) This novel was a satire about the New Orleans literary circle. Faulkner was a solitary man who wrote in isolation. He criticized talkative, self-important writers who were easily influenced by current fashions in lite

14、rature. Faulkner wrote fiercely and constantly, giving every poem and story to Mr. Stone, who tried in vain to find publishers for them. In the 1920s, vey few people wanted to read the kind of things he was writing. He wrote another novel and when it, too, was rejected, he decided that his work woul

15、d never be published again. In a way this realization liberated him. Such a true artist as he, that it only enconcouraged him to write more, exactly as he wanted, unbothered by thoughts of what the public might like. Faulkner rewrote the rejected novel under the title Sartoris (1929), and at the sam

16、e time wrote a new one The Sound and the Fury, his first masterpiece. To his great surprise, both of them were published in 1929, and although vey few copies were bought by the public, reviews by literary critics praised them highly. In the same year, Estelle came back from Asia, having divorced her

17、 husband, and she married Faulkner. He bought a deserted, ruined mansion, built before the Civil War, which he began to repair with his own hammer and saw, and settled down to be a fulltime author. From 1930 to 1942, Faulkner was hugely productive. He wrote two collections of short stories, a volume

18、 of poetry and nine novels. 他完成了两部短篇小说集，一本诗集，还有九部小说。 Even so, he could not earn enough money to live in those Depression years, because his books were difficult to read. The literary critics also turned against him, blaming him for concentrating too narrowly on Southern subjects, and for writing in

19、a complicated, highly original style. Undeterred, he took a job writing film scripts for Hollywood at a low but steady salary (just as F. Scott Fitzgerald was doing at that time) and continued to write his own books. Faulkner believed that every writer should invent his own style and method, as Hemi

20、ngway had done, and continue to experiment. For instance, in his early book, The Sound and the Fury, he used a technique called “stream of consciousness”, in which the whole story was told through the thoughts of one character. Later, he used the same technique but explored its utmost possibilities

21、by putting the thoughts into the mind of a lunatic. (a person who is mentally ill) He was willing to take the risk of making mistakes, which he sometimes did, and learning from his mistakes. In 1936, his novel Absalom, Absalom!（押沙龙，押沙龙！）, now considered one of his best, was most scathingly reviewed

22、(harshly criticized) , and his readers began to fall away. By the early 1940s, Faulkner was more or less forgotten by the public, although his work was intensely admired by several other American novelists, and his books were greatly appreciated in France, where they had been very well translated. D

23、uring his great productive period of the 1930s, Faulkner began writing about an imaginary place in the Deep South called Yoknapatawpha County （约克那帕特法县）, with its main town which closely resembled Oxford, Mississippi. He invented its geography, its history and its people so precisely that it seemed l

24、ike a real place to his readers and to himself. Faulkner did not lay out a plan for his cycle (series) of Yoknapatawpha books, as John Galsworthy in England and Emile Zola in France had planned theirs. Instead, Faulkners legend simply grew, book by book. Family sagas (long stories) developed inside

25、the larger cycle through several books, covering the history of two principal families in Yokanpatawpha County. One was the Sartoris family, which had belonged to the ruling class of slave-owners before the civil war, but which deteriorated in the 20th century because it could not adapt to new condi

26、tions. As the old leadership died out, power was seized by a new class of poor-white up-starts, symbolized by the unscrupulous Snopes family. They were scorned and feared by the effete (衰老的) Sartoris clan. Other stories about life, past and present, in Yoknapatawpha County filled out this extraordin

27、arily diverse, imaginative body of work. Faulkner started a second rise to fame, higher than the first, in 1945, when, at the insistence of other writers, a New York publishing house issued The Portable Faulkner, which presented the Yoknapatawpha stories in historical order. Many novelists took the

28、opportunity to write explanatory essays and the public began to read Faulkner again. His books were studied with great care by scholars and academic critics, and an ever-growing stream of essays and dissertations on Faulkners work began to pour out of American universities. His next novel, Intruder

29、In The Dust (1948), was a success and so was his next collection of short stories. In 1950, he received both Americas highest literary award and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Against his private, solitary nature, Faulkner became a well-known public figure. He was sent abroad by the State Departmen

30、t to give lectures in South America, Europe and Japan. In his last period of writing, in the late 1950s, Faulkner completed his cycle of stories about Yoknapatawpha County. The county became a pleasanter place in his imagination, and he expressed a more tolerant view of human nature, even changing h

31、is opinion about some of the characters who had appeared in his earlier books “Because” he said, “I know them better now.” his last book, The Rievers (1962) was a comedy about boyhood. It was published and widely acclaimed only a month before his death in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner died just one

32、year after Hemingway, and so passed away Americas two most remarkable modern writers. His Style. Faulkner used a remarkable range of techniques, themes and tones in his fiction. His stylistic innovations were often adapted from the experiments of other modern writers, which he then used in his own w

33、ay. His books are sometimes difficult to read, and need close study by the reader. His works are distinguished by complex plots, sometimes extending over several novels in which the same characters appear. The hero of one story may appear as a minor character in another. He successfully advanced two modern literary techniques: s