HISTORY HAUNTS THE present in William Faulkner’s novels, as this famous line from Requiem for a Nun (1951) suggests. Faulkner (1897–1962) was born in Mississippi, and his great novels focus on the decline of the Southern aristocracy in and around the fictional town of Jefferson. He invented old Mississippi families like the Compsons, the Bundrens, the Sutpens, and the McCaslins in such novels as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), as well as in interrelated short stories like those in Go Down, Moses (1942). Eventually recognized with the Nobel Prize in 1949, Faulkner couldn’t pay the bills with his fiction. Like many writers of his day, Faulkner went west, seeking income as a Hollywood screenwriter. Think you know this American literary master? Take this quick quiz and find out.
1. In what fictional county is most of Faulkner’s Mississippi fiction set?
2. Which mentally retarded character narrates the first section of The Sound and the Fury?
3. Which Faulkner masterpiece takes its title from a biblical passage in which King David mourns his dead son?
4. Which Faulkner novel features Joe Christmas, an orphan who wants to know his racial lineage?
5. Which movie, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, had a screenplay adapted by William Faulkner from a novel by Ernest Hemingway?
ANSWERS
1. Yoknapatawpha County.
2. Benjy Compson.
3. Absalom, Absalom!
4. Light in August (1932).
5. To Have and Have Not (1944). Faulkner also adapted Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep for the 1946 Bogart and Bacall movie of the same name.