William Faulkner 威廉 福克纳 （1897-1962）

William Faulkner ranks with Ernest Hemingway as one of the leading American authors of the Twentieth Century. Faulkner, like Robert Frost, was a regionalist, who spent most of his life in a small, particular area of the United States, writing about the scenes and people he knew best. Faulkner’s region was the Deep South, with its bitter history of slavery, civil war and destruction. He invented a county and a town in his imagination very similar to his own part of Mississippi, and he wrote about the society in the South by inventing families which represented different social forces: the old, decaying upper class; the rising, ambitious, unscrupulous class of “poor

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whites”; and the Negroes who labored for both of them. Most of his stories take place in this imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, and concern members of the same families at different times in history. 他的多数故事都发生在他构想的Yoknapatawpha县，他笔下的人物不是一次写完，同一人物会在几本书中，在不同历史时期反复出现。这显然加深了人物的开掘，使其具有历史的深广度。

His Life.

William Faulkner was born in the Deep South, the oldest of four brothers. His father was the business manager for the State University in Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His family came from the

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old, white upper class. Though in

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decline in the 20 century, the family retained some of the old customs. Falkner was brought up by a black nurse whom he called Mammie Cally, who told him many stories remembered from the time of slavery. Faulkner was an imaginative boy. There was no public library in Oxford, but there were plenty of English classics at home, which he read at random. He disliked school and dropped out after two years of high school. The people of Oxford considered him a wastrel. (a wasteful or worthless person)

Two neighbors had a decisive influence on him. He fell in love with a young neighbor named Estelle, and, hoping to get married one day, he took a respectable job in a bank. Another neighbor, Philip Stone （菲尔，斯多）,

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