William Faulkner: "Ninety-Nine Percent Talent...Ninety-Nine Percent Discipline...Ninety-Nine Percent Work."

Today is the birthday (1897) of William Faulkner, the celebrated world-famous writer and favorite son of Oxford, Mississippi. He explored the character of the South in a string of novels and stories predominately over a twenty year period beginning around 1920. This work earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Later work was recognized with two Pulitzer Prizes.

Faulkner has never been an easy read for this writer. His complexity and detail, along with the run on sentences and page long paragraphs, makes the experience as challenging as the analysis of his characters. Having lived four decades in the Deep South, I can appreciate in my own small way the 20th century Southern personality Faulkner captured. Folks here were different then. Now that regional character continues to change with a changing South. It is an interesting overlay.

In 1956, Faulkner sat for a Paris Review interview by Jean Stein. It became a seminal piece on the art of fiction as well as an insightful exchange on the writer himself. Readers can access the interview here. 

And here is the the author reading from The Sound and the Fury, the novel ignored by reader when first published in 1929, but would later bring him fame after the publication of Sanctuary in 1931.

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Faulkner photo, Carl Van Vecten Collection, United States Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Text:
title quote, from the Paris Review interview, 1956.
Wikipedia.org