In 1905, Faulkner entered the first grade at the tender age of eight, and immediately showed signs of talent. He not only drew an explicitly detailed drawing of a locomotive, but he soon became an honor-roll student. Throughout his early education, he would work conscientiously at reading, spelling, writing, and arithmetic. However, he especially enjoyed drawing. When Faulkner got promoted to the third grade, skipping the second grade, he was asked by his teacher what he wanted to be when he grew up. He replied, "I want to be a writer just like my great granddaddy"(Minter 18). Faulkner took inte

rest in poetry around 1910, but no one in Oxford, Mississippi, could tell him what to do with his poems.

From the early 1930's to the early 1940's Faulkner spent a lot of his time writing. Before the end of 1942, he published seven novels, two collections of short stories, and a book of poems (Volpe 12). Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! were written in this time period. These two novels rank among the greatest novels in contemporary literature. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 (Volpe 12). As Faulkner was coming to the end of his life, he spoke to the cadets at West Point. In his speech he read from his last novel called "The Reivers, which became, with in a few days of publication, a national best seller"(Volpe 13). Shortly there after, on July 6, 1962, the great author died of a heart attack. Faulkner was known for his realistic novels and true-to-life short stores. From 1926 to 1962, Faulkner published nineteen novels and more than seventy- five short stories. Most of the novels and a good many of the short stories are about the people living in a fictional county in the northern regions of Mississippi called Yoknapatawpha County. The main town in the county is a small town called Jefferson (Volpe 13). "Yoknapatawpha County covers an area of 2,400 square acres and contains, according to Faulkner's count, 6,298 whites and 9,313 Negroes"(Volpe 15). In all of Faulkner's works about the people of this county, he actually identifies around six hundred of them by name. Faulkner uses character and character personalities multiple times in several novels and short stories. For example, "the Negro companion of the aristocratic white boy is named Ringo in The Unvanquished and Alex Sanders in Intruder in the Dust, but their characters are almost identical"(Volpe 16-17). "Faulkner is too complex a writer to explain in terms of a single idea, much of his work can be understood by recognizing that at the center of the fiction is one crucial experience: the transition of a boy to manhood"(Volpe 17). Faulkner often unified his stories by writing about the same families (Volpe 30). His novels a

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