Date: 1951.

Biography:

William Cuthbert Falkner

William Cuthbert Falkner was born in New Albany, Union County, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He was the son of Murry Cuthbert Falkner (1870-1932) and Maud (Butler) Falkner (1871-1960). His great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (1825-1889), commanded two different Confederate regiments; was elected to the Mississippi legislature, the author of The White Rose of Memphis and other novels, and the owner of a railroad; and had a town in Tippah County, Mississippi, named for him.

Murry and Maud Falkner moved to Ripley, Tippah County, in 1898, after Murry Falkner was appointed as treasurer of the Gulf and Chicago Railroad Company, which was owned by his father, J. W. T. Falkner. The railroad was sold by J. W. T. Falkner for seventy-five thousand dollars in 1902, and Murry Falkner moved his family to Oxford, Lafayette County, Mississippi.

William Falkner and his three brothers were brought up by Caroline Barr (Mammy Callie), who had been born into slavery around 1840. After attending the Oxford public schools until the eleventh grade, Falkner briefly attended classes at the University of Mississippi. When Falkner was denied enlistment in the armed forces because of his height, he changed his name to William C. Faulkner, obtained falsified British citizenship documents, and enlisted in the British Royal Air Force in June of 1918. However, World War I ended while Faulkner was still training in Canada, thus thwarting his hopes of flying combat missions. He was officially demobilized in January of 1919, and he was later given an honorary title of second lieutenant.

Returning to Oxford, Faulkner acquired a limp and told stories of combat during the war, some of which later appeared in his novels and short stories. Faulkner moved several times in subsequent years, working at a number of odd jobs, including one at the University of Mississippi post office. Living for a time with writer Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans and then returning to Oxford, Faulkner published several largely unsuccessful early works, including Mosquitoes and Soldiers Pay. In January of 1929, he published Sartoris, or Flags in the Dust, his first novel about the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, that would provide the setting for the majority of his future novels.

On June 20, 1929, Faulkner married childhood sweetheart Lida Estelle (Oldham) Franklin (1896-1972), who had recently divorced husband Cornell Franklin. He published The Sound and the Fury in October of 1929. After As I Lay Dying was published in 1930, Faulkner bought a home in Oxford that he named Rowan Oak. The Faulkners had two daughters: Alabama, who died soon after she was born in 1931, and Jill (b. 1933).

Faulkner began working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in Hollywood, California, in May of 1932. He would continue working intermittently as an editor and screenwriter for Warner Brothers and other Hollywood studios until his release from a lengthy Warner Brothers contract in 1946. While working in Hollywood and especially during intervals when he was able to return to Rowan Oak, Faulkner wrote numerous works, including some of his most acclaimed novels such as Absalom, Absalom!; Go Down, Moses; and Light in August.

In 1939, Faulkner was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He traveled to Stockholm, Sweden, to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in December of 1950. Faulkner also received a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize following the 1953 publication of A Fable.

In 1951, Faulkner spoke out against the death sentence of Willie McGee, a black man convicted and later executed for raping a white woman from Laurel, Jones County, Mississippi. During the civil rights movement, Faulkner also became embroiled in integration controversies. He later worked some of these issues into his novels and wrote more polemically about his views in magazines and newspapers. In the politically charged climate of 1955, Faulkner left Mississippi and the hate mail he had been receiving, taking the first of several official trips for the State Department. He traveled from Japan through Europe to Iceland, and on later trips he visited Greece and Venezuela, speaking on a number of issues, from aesthetic to racial ones.

Faulkner became writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, in 1957, and he bought a house there. He subsequently divided his time between Charlottesville and Oxford, and he continued to travel extensively. In the years before his death, Faulkner occasionally worked with motion-picture director Howard Hawks and other directors of films and plays while continuing to write novels, completing a career that encompassed the publication of over seventeen novels and more than one hundred essays, poems, and short stories. Faulkner died at Wrights Sanitarium in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 6, 1962, and he was buried at Oxford.

 
Scope and Content Note:

This collection consists of a photocopy of a letter written by William Faulkner, Rowan Oak, Oxford, Mississippi, to Robert M. Bridgeforth, Pickens, Holmes County, Mississippi, on March 31, 1951. He was responding to a letter from Bridgeforth about a controversial statement reportedly made by Faulkner. Speaking to a group of women from the Civil Rights Congress earlier that month, Faulkner had argued against the execution of Willie McGee, but he was misquoted in the newspaper and in several magazines as advocating violence in response to the possibility of a black insurrection. Faulkner wrote Bridgeforth to thank him for sending some magazines, and he then described being interviewed and misquoted, apologizing for what he had said and stating that he was still against the execution. Accompanying the letter is a photocopy of the front page of the March 26, 1951, issue of the Jackson Daily News concerning the Supreme Courts denial of a new trial for McGee.

 
Series Identification:

Series 1: Letter. 1951. 1 folder.