Light In August
Overview of William Faulkner College
William Cuthbert Falkner started his life on September 25, 1897, in Mississippi. He was born into a prominent family, who owned banks and a railroad. Mammy Callie, his childhood nurse, was a major contributor to his works. The stories she would tell him stayed with him for his entire life, and even inspired some of his stories. Although his greatest influence was his great-grandfather, whom everyone called the Old Colonel. Falkner decided from a young age that he was going to write just like the Old Colonel. He was not scholarly though, by the fourth grade he grew bored with school and finally dropped out his second time through the eleventh grade. Falkner had many jobs, before his first manuscript was published. He joined the British Royal Air Force and added a “u” to his last name, to make himself sound more British, but he would never see a day of combat. After his failed attempt at being a pilot, he returned to Oxford and became the Postmaster at the University of Mississippi Post Office. When he was fired for throwing mail away, he moved to New Orleans and started writing. The publishers did not like his first book Flags in the Dust, so he edited it down and renamed it Sartoris. Although he had a rocky start,...
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