The year 1932 would mark the beginning of a new sometime profession for Faulkner, as screenwriter in Hollywood. During an extended trip to New York City the previous year, he had made a number of important contacts in Hollywood, including actress Tallulah Bankhead. In April 1932, Faulkner signed a six-week contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and in May Faulkner initiated what would be the first of many stints as screenwriter in Hollywood. In July, Faulkner met director Howard Hawks, with whom he shared a common passion for flying and hunting. Of the six screenplays for which Faulkner would receive on-screen credit, five would be for films directed by Hawks, the first of which was Today We Live (1933), based on Faulkner's short story Turn About [35, p.47-52].
Faulkner returned to Oxford in August after the sudden death of his father. With the addition of his mother to his growing number of dependents, Faulkner needed money. He returned to Hollywood in October with his mother and younger brother Dean, and sold Paramount the rights to film Sanctuary. The film, retitled The Story of Temple Drake, opened in May 1933, one month after the Memphis premiere of Today We Live which Faulkner attended. That spring also saw the publication of A Green Bough, Faulkner's second and last collection of poetry.
In June, Estelle gave birth to Faulkner's only surviving daughter, Jill. The following winter, Faulkner wrote to his publisher that he was working on a new novel whose working title, like Light in August before, was Dark House. “Roughly”, he wrote, “the theme is a man who outraged the land, and the land then turned and destroyed the man's family. Quentin Compson, of the “Sound & Fury”, tells it, or ties it together; he is the protagonist so that it is not complete apocrypha” [17, p.14-15].
In April 1934, Faulkner published a second collection of stories, Doctor Martino and Other Stories. That spring, he began a series of Civil War stories to be sold to The Saturday Evening Post. Faulkner would later revise and collect them together to form the novel The Unvanquished (1938). In March 1935, he published the non-Yoknapatawpha novel Pylon, which was inspired apparently by the death of Captain Merle Nelson during an air show on February 14, 1934, at the inauguration of an airport in New Orleans. A few months later, in November, his brother Dean was killed in a crash.
In December, Faulkner began another “tour of duty” in Hollywood working with Hawks, this time at 20th Century-Fox, where he met Meta Carpenter, Hawks' secretary and script girl, with whom Faulkner would have an affair. Late that month, Faulkner and collaborator Joel Sayre completed a screenplay for the film The Road to Glory, which would premiere in June 1936 [42].
Today We Live (1933), starring Franchot Tone, Joan Crawford, and Robert Young, was Faulkner's first credited screenplay and the only one he wrote for the big screen based on his own published fiction.
Faulkner spent much of 1936 and the first eight months of 1937 in Hollywood, again working for 20th Century-Fox, receiving on-screen writing credit for Slave Ship (1937) and contributing to the story for Gunga Din (1939). In April, his mistress, Meta Carpenter, married Wolfgang Rebner and went with him to Germany. Back at Rowan Oak in September, Faulkner began working on a new novel, which would consist of two short novellas with two completely separate casts of characters appearing alternately throughout the book. Faulkner's title for the book was If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, consisting of the novellas The Wild Palms and Old Man.
In February 1938, Random House published The Unvanquished, a novel consisting of seven stories, six of which had originally appeared in an earlier form in The Saturday Evening Post. A kind of “prequel” to Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, The Unvanquished tells the earlier history of the Sartoris family during and immediately after the Civil War, focusing especially on Bayard Sartoris, son of the legendary Colonel John Sartoris who, like Faulkner's real-life great-grandfather, was gunned down in the street by a former business partner.
While in New York in the fall of 1938, Faulkner began writing a short story, Barn Burning, which would be published in Harper's the following year. But Faulkner was not finished with the story. He had in mind a trilogy about the Snopes family, a lower-class rural laboring white family who, unlike the Compsons and Sartorises of other Faulkner novels, had little regard for southern tradition, heritage, or lineage. The Snopes, often regarded as Faulkner's metaphor for the rising “redneck” middle class in the South, more interested in avaricious commercial gain than honor or pride, were to be led in the trilogy by the enterprising Flem Snopes, who in the original story Barn Burning had appeared only briefly as the eldest son of Ab Snopes [41, p. 310-318].
In January 1939, Faulkner was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. That same month, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem was published under the title The Wild Palms. In April 1940, the first book of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, was published by Random House. Featuring a reworked version of Barn Burning and other stories Faulkner had published, including Spotted Horses, the novel follows Flem Snopes from being the poor son of a barn-burning sharecropper to his securing a storekeeper's job, as “fire insurance”, in the hamlet of Frenchman's Bend (in southeastern Yoknapatawpha County).
Throughout 1941, Faulkner spent much of his time writing and reworking stories into an episodic novel about the McCaslin family, several members of whom had appeared briefly in The Unvanquished. Though several stories that would comprise Go Down, Moses had been published separately, Faulkner revised extensively the parts that would comprise the novel, which spans more than 100 years in the history of Yoknapatawpha County.
Barn Burning was made into a short film as part of the The American Short Story Collection. Starring Tommy Lee Jones as Ab Snopes, Shawn Whittington as Sartie, and Jimmy Faulkner, William Faulkner's nephew, as Major De Spain, the video is excellent for classroom usage.
Sale of his novels, meanwhile, had slumped, so he returned to California in July 1942 to begin another stint at screen writing, this time for Warner Brothers, who insisted he sign for seven years, which he was told was “only a formality”.
The following year, he began to work intermittently on A Fable, a novel whose plot would revolve around a reincarnation of Christ during the First World War. It would take him more than ten years to complete it [26]. Also in 1943, he was assigned to write the screenplay for Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not, but because of an extended vacation, he did not begin work on it until February 1944. In August 1944, Faulkner began writing a screenplay adaptation of Raymond Chandler's detective novel The Big Sleep. It would premiere, also starring Bogart and Bacall, in August 1946. During this period, Faulkner also collaborated with Jean Renoir on his film The Southerner, but with no screen credit since it would violate his Warner Brothers contract. It would premiere in August 1945. The three films together would represent the pinnacle of Faulkner's screen writing career.
In March 1947, while continuing to work on his Christ fable, he wrote letters to the Oxford newspaper to support the preservation of the old courthouse on the town square, which some townspeople had proposed demolishing to build a larger one. In April, he agreed to meet in question-and-answer sessions with English classes at the University of Mississippi, but he invited controversy when his candid statement about Hemingway - “he has no courage, has never climbed out on a limb ... has never used a word where the reader might check his usage by a dictionary” [13, p.94] - was included in a press release about the sessions. When Hemingway read the remarks, he was hurt, moved even to write a letter answering the charge that he lacked “courage”, but when it grew too long, he asked a friend, Brigadier General C.T. Lanham to write and tell Faulkner only what he knew about Hemingway's heroism as a war correspondent. He wrote Hemingway apologizing and saying, “I hope it won't matter a damn to you. But if or whenever it does, please accept another squirm from yours truly” [13, p.95].
In January 1948, Faulkner put aside A Fable to write a novel he considered a detective story. The central character is Lucas Beauchamp, who had appeared as a key descendant of old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin in Go Down, Moses, upon whose name his own was based. In the novel Beauchamp is accused of murdering a white man and must rely upon the wits of a teenage boy, Chick Mallison, to clear his name before the lynch mob arrives to do its job. In July, MGM purchased the film rights to the novel, and in October, Intruder in the Dust was published. In the spring of 1949, director Clarence Brown and a film crew descended upon Oxford, Mississippi, to film the novel on location, and while the townspeople eagerly welcomed the film-makers, even playing a number of extra and minor roles in the film, Faulkner was very reluctant to participate, though he may have helped to rework the final scene. In October 1949, the world premiere of Brown's Intruder in the Dust took place at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford. Faulkner attended at the insistence of his Aunt Alabama McLean [7].
In November, Faulkner published Knight's Gambit, a collection of detective stories including Tomorrow and Smoke. That same month, in Stockholm, fifteen of the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy voted to award the Nobel Prize for literature to Faulkner, but since a unanimous vote was required, the awarding of the prize was delayed by a year. The world premiere of the film version of Intruder in the Dust occurred at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford in 1949 [10].
In the summer of 1949, Faulkner had met Joan Williams, a young student and author of a prize-winning story. In 1950, he began collaboration with her on Requiem for a Nun, a part-prose, part-play sequel to Sanctuary. In narrative prose sections preceding each of the play's three acts, Faulkner details some of the early history of Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, and the state of Mississippi. His collaboration with Williams would eventually grow into a love affair.
In June 1950, Faulkner was awarded the Howells Medal for distinguished work in American fiction. In August, he published Collected Stories, the third and last collection of stories published by Faulkner. It includes forty-two of the forty-six stories published in magazines since 1930, excluding those which he had published or incorporated into The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and Knight's Gambit. Two months later, Faulkner received word that the Swedish Academy had voted to award him and Bertrand Russell as corecipients of the Nobel Prize for literature, Russell for 1950 and Faulkner for the previous year. At first he refused to go to Stockholm to receive the award, but pressured by the U.S. State Department, the Swedish Ambassador to the United States, and finally by his own family, he agreed to go [13, p.101-115].
On December 10, he delivered his acceptance speech to the academy in a voice so low and rapid that few could make out what he was saying, but when his words were published in the newspaper the following day, it was recognized for its brilliance; in later years, Faulkner's speech would be lauded as the best speech ever given at a Nobel ceremony. In it, Faulkner alluded to the impending Cold War and the constant fear, “a general and universal physical fear”, whose consequence was to make “the young man or woman writing today forgets the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat”. The artist, Faulkner said, must re-learn “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” [7, p.363]. He concludes on an optimistic note: “I decline to accept the end of man... I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things.... The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail” [7, p.364].
At Howard Hawks' request, Faulkner returned to Hollywood one last time in February 1951 to rework a script titled The Left Hand of God for 20th Century-Fox. The following month, he was awarded the National Book Award for Collected Stories, and in May, shortly after having delivered the commencement address at his daughter's high school graduation ceremony, French President Vincent Auriol bestowed the award of Legion of Honor upon Faulkner [9].
While in New York in January 1953, he adapted his story The Brooch for television while also working on A Fable and suffering bouts of back pain and alcoholism that required hospitalization. In March he was again hospitalized. The following month, Estelle suffered a hemorrhage and heart attack, so Faulkner returned to Oxford. He returned to New York in May, where he met Dylan Thomas. In June, he delivered an address to Jill's graduating class at Pine Manor Junior College. Following another hospitalization in September, Faulkner was horrified to find his sacrosanct privacy invaded by the publication of a two-part biographical article by Robert Coughlan in September and October's issues of Life magazine [11].
In November, Albert Camus' agent wrote Faulkner requesting permission to adapt Requiem for a Nun for the stage, to which Faulkner agreed. At the end of the month, he traveled to Egypt to assist Howard Hawks in the filming of Land of the Pharaohs, their last collaboration. For the next several months, he traveled throughout Europe. He returned to Oxford at the end of April 1954, after a six-month absence. That same month saw the publication of Mississippi, a mostly nonfiction article mingling history, his childhood, and his own work against the backdrop of his native state, in Holiday magazine; and The Faulkner Reader, an anthology which includes the complete text of The Sound and the Fury, three additional long stories (or “novellas”) - The Bear from Go Down, Moses, Old Man from The Wild Palms, and Spotted Horses from The Hamlet - as well as several other stories and novel excerpts. The three novellas would in 1958 be published together under the title Three Famous Short Novels. In August, after more than ten years of work, Faulkner finally published A Fable, dedicating it to Jill and Estelle. Later that month, Jill and Paul Summers were married in Oxford [23].
To keep track of the complex plot in A Fable, Faulkner wrote outlines of the novel's seven days on the wall in his office at Rowan Oak.
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