William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. His great-grandfather, Colonel William C. Faulkner, had been shot dead in the street by his ex-partner, with whom he had built the first railroad from Pontotoc, Mississippi, to Middleton, Tennessee. Faulkner's grandfather was president of this railroad, and his father, Maori, was in succession a treasurer, a lawyer, and an owner of a livery stable. Faulkner himself, due to this influence, tried his hand at many jobs. He learned to fly in the Royal Air Force training school in Canada. He wanted desperately to be a pilot in World War I but the Armistice left him unfulfilled in this goal.
He spent less than a year in college before leaving, and this brought him to his first job of any real length as postmaster at the university of Mississippi. It was experience like this which enabled Faulkner to learn the character traits and social mores of those he would come to mimic so well in his writings about this area and those in the South. The post office experience would not be the first time Faulkner would use his life's experiences to bring a certain vividness and meaning to his works. His first published work, Soldier's Pay is filled with his experience and atmosphere gained while working as postmaster: "There was a general movement into the post office. The mail was in and the window opened and even those who expected no mail, who had received no mail in months must needs answer one of the most enduring compulsions of the American nation" (Blotner vx). Faulkner's early life was spent almost entirely in the South. He was married in 1929 and began to slowly earn his way as a writer. When he was offered the Nobel prize for literature in 1950 he was ecstatic, and his Speech of Acceptance earned him world-wide fame. From 1957-58 he was "Writer-in-Residence" at the University of Virginia, and before that had spent time in Japan, being used by the State Department as a...