生平
福克纳出生于一个历史悠久的南方家庭。他在牛津镇长大，该镇后来成为其小说中虚构的杰斐逊镇的原型。他的家族史也被写进了他的小说中。一战早期他曾在加拿大参加英国陆军航空队，训练未完一战就已结束了。回国后他在密西西比大学就读一年，后做过多种杂工。他的前两部小说并未引起注意，而1929年出版的《沙特里斯》却表现出其创作已渐臻成熟。他的下一部《喧哗与骚动》是一部较为成熟的作品。而后，他的主要作品陆续出版。1946年文学批评家马尔科姆考利编辑了他的作品选集《福克纳读本》，并详细介绍他的著作。福克纳成为文学批评界的焦点。福克纳于1949年获得诺贝尔文学奖。福克纳的作品被称为“约克纳帕特发世家小说”。在这些作品里福克纳描写了许多南方贵族的家族史。在这些家族发迹时福克纳就预示到他们必然的衰落。因为他们剥夺了印第安人的土地，奴役了黑人，受到了诅咒。当悲壮的兴衰史在一部部小说中不断呈现时，它就具有了象征性的意义。很显然，福克纳想要表达的不仅仅涉及美国南方，也包括整个人类的生活状况。现代生活中精神的堕落直接源于缺乏爱和情感上的回应。
写作特点
(1)福克纳极重视人物的塑造，这是他表现人的多面性的关键所在。他给予角色最大程度的自主和独立。他运用了一些手法以保证人物的独立性。其中最重要的是“作者的超脱”，这通过不可靠的叙事者和多位叙事者的手法实现。
(2)他的作品里有很多的内心独白。现代意识流技巧频繁恰当地运用单词常挤到一块，没有大写和标点符号句子意义指代不明，长句子奇怪地堆积到一起。代词的使用加重了其文章的复杂性。
(3)他的作品里包含日常口语，地方方言，又有规范的文学语言，涵盖了英语语言的多个语域。
(4)福克纳的想象力异常丰富。他把作品植根于美国南部历史,创造出一种独特的文学氛围，最终超越具体的人或事的局限而触及普遍性的问题。
作品分析The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury is William Faulkner's best novel. Here is "a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing."There is enough despair and nihilism but not much love and emotion in this sad story of the Compsons.Mr.Compson is disenchanted with life and the society he lives in. Unable to find meaning in the moral verities he was brought up with, he escapes into alcoholism and cynicism. Mrs. Compson is spiritually effete and has little love to spare for her children. Of the four children,Caddy is the only one capable of loving, but she loses her virginity.The youngest brother, Benjy, is an idiot, a curse on the family. Another, Quentin, lives in the ideal world of his youth with his dreams of love, honor, and integrity, and,when he fails to keep off the intrusion of the "loud, harsh world".he destroys himself. The life of the eldest brother,Jason,is empty and meaningless. Love is alien to him, and so are other traditional humanistic values.
The Sound and the Fury tells a story of deterioration from the past to the present. The past is idealized to forn striking contrast with the loveless present. There is in the book an acute feeling of nostalgia toward the happy past, Quentins section offers a good illustration. A miserable creature in the modern world, Quentin frequently casts a backward glance at the time of his childhood when life was innocent, romantic, and secure. He just cannot bring himself to come to terms with the present which is, to him, purposeless, futile. and devoid of the values which make life worth living. His suicide offers an example of a complete negation of the present. In a sense, Quentin's value system may represent Faulkner's own idea of an ideal way of life,that of an ante-bellum society. The fact that Benjy's section begins the book is not a haphazard arrangement on the part of the author, for it is Benjy who feels most keenly the loss of love. Benjy lives on the emotional support of love. Although an idiot with no sense of time, he knows who loves him best. When caddy is gone, his world of love vanishes with her, and nobody can take her place. not even Dilsey.Thus this section helps to dramatize the theme of loss from the very beginning of the story. With the story of Jason whose life embodies all the vices of the modern world, the contrast between the ante-bellum society and the present one is brought out in the most poignant manner possible.The triumph of rationalism over feeling and compassion is best illustrated in this sterile and loveless individual.
