The Best Works: William Faulkner

William Faulkner is one of my favourite writers in the world. From a young age, I was interested in Faulkner’s divine writing style, his southern gothic atmosphere, his Shakespearean and Biblical-scaled tragedies. Most importantly, I think I was interested in his characters the most. Faulkner’s works are known for being filled with intense darkness, destruction and the danger of humans when they are taken out of their natural environments. A satire on the heavy industrialisation of the USA during and after the times of the Civil War, Faulkner’s writing was often heaped in darkness, tragedy, well-written and almost poetically style prose along with characters that you could’ve seen coming from either a Shakespeare Play, the Bible or a 18th Century Opera. These almost Byronic heroes tend to take the Hamlet-like form and often end up worse than they began. Death overtakes in many cases and the natural world around the character is harmful, turned against them, as they move through the world and get out of their habitats, they long for release from this new, self-destructive lifestyle that brings them nothing but greed and misery.

In 1949, William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his contribution to the Modern American Novel. Faulkner did not enjoy the fame it got him and donated his prize money to a charity that helped to educate African-American Teachers in Mississippi and also he donated some of it to establish a fund for new writers - this resulted in the “Faulkner Award” being made. France gave Faulkner the Legion of Honour title in 1951. In 1987, The United States Postal Service issued a stamp in his honour and the Mississippi Writers Trail marks sections of the walk for Faulkner’s contribution to the literary landscape at Rowan Oak.

Altogether, William Faulkner wrote nineteen novels and over one hundred short stories, he wrote six collections of poetry and has a number of letters, essays and critical analyses still in circulation today. In my opinion, his greatest short story will always be “A Rose For Emily”, but we’re not here to look at short stories are we? No we aren’t. We are here to see what Faulkner’s top ten novels are and why. Often it is difficult to choose what will go at number one, but I think I know exactly what I’m going to put there and if you know me and have been following my articles then I’m sure you’ll already know what number one is as well.

Faulkner is an inspiration to modern American writing and has often been overlooked in the world of the Southern Gothic thanks to its revival in the 50s and 60s with “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee and the rise of Southern African-American Novels such as the works of Toni Morrison. I ask you to of course, read Lee and Morrison because they too, are amazing writers, but also do not overlook William Faulkner. He was a great human being and a writer who well exceeded the Southern writers of his day. His novels are often shrouded in realism and tragedy so extreme that you can’t really think it is fantastical - there is really no other way for it to happen. Faulkner’s plots are so realistic that you will often find yourself scared by human nature because it includes such a great case of greed and selfishness, there is little consideration or sympathy for others and the way in which we act can lead to severe harm, not just to ourselves but to those we once loved and cared about as well. Faulkner opens our eyes to the real world, the way in which we long to be a part of a greater community with a greater amount of money and altogether, we want more and more until it is too much to handle. When it becomes too much to handle, Faulkner shows us that as a result of our greed, there is really no way back and we must then fall down the ladder back to earth, back to where we came from and back to nothingness, often resulting in death and anguish from all sides.

The Best Works: William Faulkner

10. Intruder in the Dust

9. Go Down, Moses

8. The Wild Palms

7. Sanctuary

6. The Unvanquished

5. As I Lay Dying

4. Light in August

3. Sartoris

2. The Sound and the Fury

1. Absalom, Absalom!