Faulkner had several different jobs--ranging from bank clerk to postmaster at the university--during the long period before he established himself as a writer. In 1918, unable to meet height and weight requirements for the U.S. Army, he had instead joined the Canadian branch of the Royal Air Force and went into training in Toronto. World War I came to an end, though, before he could take part. He received a discharge in early December and returned to Oxford, where his girlfriend, Estelle Oldham, had married Cornell Franklin, a local lawyer.
In 1919-1920, while attending the University of Mississippi as a special student, Faulkner had his first poems and sketches published, and in the early 1920s--after officially withdrawing from the university in November 1920--he wrote numerous poems, a few sketches, and a verse play, The Marionettes, which was performed in 1920 but not published until 1975. He went to New York, where he worked briefly as a bookstore clerk in 1921, and his first book, The Marble Faun, a cycle of poems, was published in Boston in 1924. That same year he met Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans, and for the first half of 1925, Faulkner lived there with the Andersons.
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