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“My own experience has been that the tools I need
for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.”
By 1944, William Faulkner was a literary footnote. Though
in the 1930s, he’d produced a string of important novels,
including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August.
Only one, Sanctuary, was still in print, and it was the one
he claimed to have written purely for the money. Since
1935 he’d been supporting his family by travelling to
Hollywood part of each year to write screenplays for the
motion picture industry. He’d begun to have some success
there, but as a novelist, Faulkner was all but forgotten in
his own country.
All of that changed in 1944 when he received a letter
from Malcolm Cowley, editor of The Portable Hemingway.
Cowley suggested they collaborate on a similar anthology
for Faulkner’s work. Two years later, it was published, and
it proved be a turning point for Faulkner’s career and
reputation. Within a year, the Modern Library had brought
all of his work back into print, and the awards started
coming soon after: the Howells Medal for Distinguished
Work in American Literature, the National Book Award for
his Collected Stories, and finally, in 1950, the Nobel Prize
for Literature. In six short years, he’d gone from literary
footnote to national treasure. |
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William Faulkner
(1897–1962) |
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