Sanctuary

William Faulkner was born in 1897 to an upper-middle-class Southern family in Mississippi. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, the town in which “Ole Miss,” or the University of Mississippi, is based. He was an intelligent student but became uninterested in doing schoolwork as he grew older. In 1918, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but never saw battle or even flew. He had a variety of different jobs and published some poems and short stories before relocating to New Orleans. In New Orleans, he wrote his first few novels, including The Sound and the Fury in 1928 and As I Lay Dying in 1930. After marrying Estelle Oldham in 1929, they bought a house in Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner wrote Sanctuary in 1931. With a family to support, Faulkner claimed to have written the book purely for profit, as the author was dissatisfied with the sales of his previous works, but this assertion has been debated since the book was published. Faulkner would go on to work in Hollywood writing screenplays and would eventually receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. He died in 1962 in Oxford, having suffered a heart attack after falling from his horse.

Inspired by old family stories about life in the Southern United States, his work often focuses on typically Southern characters and attitudes, investigating Southern gentility, culture, and nature. Like many of his contemporaries, he worked in a modernist style, with a focus on the rhythm of his books and the diction in them. His early novels closely mirror those of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Unlike these writers, however, he remained in the United States to write and is credited for his contributions to the development of the American novel. His views on desegregation were controversial, and writer James Baldwin heavily criticized him for saying that desegregation had to go slowly to protect Southern culture and way of life.