Publisher's Synopsis
William Cuthbert Falkner was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner (1870 - 1932) and Maud Butler (1871 - 1960).His family was upper middle-class, but "not quite of the old feudal cotton aristocracy".After Maud rejected Murry's plan to become a rancher in Texas, the family moved to Oxford, Mississippi in 1902, where Faulkner's father later became the business manager of the University of Mississippi.Besides short periods elsewhere, Faulkner lived in Oxford for the rest of his life.
His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline "Callie" Barr (the African American nanny who raised him from infancy) influenced the development of Falkner's artistic imagination. Both his mother and his grandmother were avid readers as well as painters and photographers, educating him in visual language. While Murry enjoyed the outdoors and encouraged his sons to hunt, track, and fish, Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church. She taught her sons to read before she sent them to public school and she also exposed them to literary classics such as the works of Charles Dickens and the Grimms' Fairy Tales.
Faulkner was influenced by stories of his great-grandfather and namesake William Clark Falkner.
Falkner spent his boyhood listening to stories which were told to him by his elders including stories which were about the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Falkner family. Falkner's grandfather also told him about the exploits of William's great-grandfather and namesake, William Clark Falkner, a successful businessman, writer, and Confederate hero. Telling stories about "Old Colonel", as his family called him, had already become something of a family pastime when Faulkner was a boy.
According to one of Falkner's biographers, by the time William was born, his great-grandfather had "long since been enshrined as a household deity."Young William was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of "black and white" Americans, his characterization of Southern characters, and his timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people who are dwelling behind the façades of good ol' boys and simpletons.
As a schoolchild, Faulkner had success early on. He excelled in the first grade, skipped the second, and did well through the third and fourth grades. However, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much quieter and more withdrawn child. He occasionally played hooky and became somewhat indifferent with regard to his schoolwork. Instead, he took an interest in studying the history of Mississippi on his own time, beginning in the seventh grade. The decline of his performance in school continued, and Falkner wound up repeating the eleventh and twelfth grades, never graduating from high school
