William (Cuthbert) Faulkner Biography

Shortly after his first birthday the family moved to Ripley, Mississippi, and four years later to Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His great-grandfather, Col. William Clark Falkner, had a literary reputation, based mainly on his novel The White Rose of Memphis (1881), and must be seen as a major influence on his descendant, not the least because of his active if not violent life, which Faulkner transformed and fictionalized as that of Col. John Sartoris. Growing up in an area of the United States that was just advancing from frontier land, Faulkner led an adventurous life as the oldest of four brothers, learning to handle guns and to hunt. His father had a livery stable for many years, and the boys lived among horses and dogs. Faulkner stopped attending Oxford High School midway through the 1914-1915 school year without completing the last grade. He returned the following fall, mostly to play football, but quit school at the end of the season. He had, however, been reading poetry with Phil Stone, an older friend who was important to Faulkner 's development in these early years, and he had already begun showing his own poems to Stone.