William Faulkner

New Yorkers got a preview Wednesday of an auction rarity: a Nobel Prize for literature. The 1950 medal belonged to William Faulkner, one of America's best-known and respected novelists. It comes with a hand-edited draft of Faulkner's acceptance speech; together, auction house Sotheby's expects those items to sell for between $500,000 and $1 million. The medal is part of a long list of Faulkner items that will be going up for auction June 11. There are 26 letters and postcards, two dozen leather-bound copies of his work and the original, hand-bound poetry book he wrote for his wife, Estelle.

James Franco's film adaptation of "As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner will be in the "Un Certain Regard" competition with 17 other films at Cannes. The official trailer, full of family feuding, sweetness, violence and rage, is above. Faulkner is the Nobel-prize-winning novelist whose work has remained some of the most significant American literature of the 20th century. He published "As I Lay Dying," the third of his novels set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, in 1930.

It is 25 years since William Faulkner, one of America's greatest novelists, was laid to rest under an oak tree in this tiny hamlet in northern Mississippi. The U. S. Postal Service recently issued a commemorative stamp--75,000 were sold and canceled in Oxford the first day as requests poured in from all over--and an excellent new biography, "William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist" by Stephen B. Oates (Harper & Row), is now in bookstores.

New Yorkers got a preview Wednesday of an auction rarity: a Nobel Prize for literature. The 1950 medal belonged to William Faulkner, one of America's best-known and respected novelists. It comes with a hand-edited draft of Faulkner's acceptance speech; together, auction house Sotheby's expects those items to sell for between $500,000 and $1 million. The medal is part of a long list of Faulkner items that will be going up for auction June 11. There are 26 letters and postcards, two dozen leather-bound copies of his work and the original, hand-bound poetry book he wrote for his wife, Estelle.

At first hearing, it sounds like an instant entry in the history of bad ideas: Take one of literature's most confounding, Baroque and at times abstract novelists and turn his books into TV, a medium that honors the literal and straightforward. And do it — probably at great expense — over and over again. On closer inspection, the pairing of David Milch — whose "Deadwood" and "NYPD Blue" took television about as close to art film as it's likely to get — with William Faulkner, author of some of the most profound and important American novels — may be so crazy it could actually work.

Carvel Collins, considered the world's foremost authority on the complex and controversial author William Faulkner, has died in an Oceanside hospital after a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He was 77. Collins, who had lived in Vista in San Diego County since his 1978 retirement, died Tuesday. First intrigued by Faulkner in 1929 as a student at Miami University, Collins was the first professor in the world to offer a course solely devoted to Faulkner.

The U.S. Postal Service has honored novelist William Faulkner, who was also a postmaster, with a commemorative stamp. The stamp was issued Monday at the University of Mississippi in conjunction with the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, 63 years after the author resigned as the university's postmaster.

Thursday is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner--and the opening date for "Words & Music: A Literary Feast in New Orleans." In what they hope will become an annual event, the nonprofit Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Inc. will present a writers' conference, a book market, music and New Orleans cuisine.

Southern California urbanites, finding the appeal of small-town life stronger than ever, might also like the idea of vacationing in a slower, steadier, more personable world. Today, Travel begins a series of articles that will look at a handful of unscientifically selected American towns (with populations under 15,000) that are safe, walkable, affordable, not too busy and not too self-conscious.

He was known in Oxford, Miss. as "Count No Count," the town bum. He was a scruffy young man in a ragged jacket who drank most of the night and hung around the golf course most of the day. He did some house painting, some gambling, some wheeling and dealing, but most of his income came from handouts from friends and his mother. He was a slight man--only 5 feet, 5 inches tall--with a bad back. He walked with a limp, and sometimes carried a cane.

New Yorkers got a preview Wednesday of an auction rarity: A Nobel Prize for  literature. The 1950  medal  belonged to William Faulkner, one of America's best-known and respected novelists. It comes with a hand-edited draft of Faulkner's acceptance speech; together, auction house Sotheby's expects those items to sell for $500,000 to $1 million . Justin Caldwell, a specialist in books and manuscripts at Sotheby's, told the Associated Press that the auction house had begun speaking to Faulkner's heirs in 2012 after an untitled, unpublished Faulkner short story was found among his literary papers at a family farm in Charlottesville, Va. It's a long list of Faulkner items that will be going up for auction June 11. There are 26 letters and postcards; some of the correspondence was sent from France to his family.

At first hearing, it sounds like an instant entry in the history of bad ideas: Take one of literature's most confounding, Baroque and at times abstract novelists and turn his books into TV, a medium that honors the literal and straightforward. And do it — probably at great expense — over and over again. On closer inspection, the pairing of David Milch — whose "Deadwood" and "NYPD Blue" took television about as close to art film as it's likely to get — with William Faulkner, author of some of the most profound and important American novels — may be so crazy it could actually work.

William Faulkner Born: Sept. 25, 1897, New Albany, Miss. Died: July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Miss. Awards and honors: Nobel Prize for literature, 1949 Life: The family name was Falkner, but he modified it. He joined the British Royal Air Force in July 1918, but the armistice ended his dreams of fighter pilot glory. His first novel, "Soldier's Pay," was published in 1926. "Sartoris," published in 1929, introduced readers to Yoknapatawpha County. The fictional place also appeared in subsequent novels, especially "The Sound and the Fury," which also was published in 1929.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past," William Faulkner wrote in 1951, two years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature. It's one of his best-known lines, but I don't think I ever truly understood it until I came to Oxford. For more than three decades, since I first read "As I Lay Dying" as a high school senior, I regarded such a sentiment as a key to Faulkner's writing — which continues to resonate because it comes drenched in history, in the interplay of the past and present, the bitter weight of heritage, the understanding that we cannot be cut free of our roots — without quite realizing that it was also a key to his life . Without quite realizing, in other words, the extent to which it has to do with Oxford, the college town 85 miles southeast of Memphis where Faulkner was raised and where he lived and died and where he is buried, and where, beginning with his third novel, "Sartoris" (1929)

Every Day by the Sun A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi Dean Faulkner Wells Crown: 272 pp., $25 The marvelous stories that crowd the pages of "Every Day by the Sun" prove that when you have five generations of Southern relatives as your subject matter, you don't even need a Nobel laureate to bolster your stock of anecdotes ? though it never hurts. William Faulkner is the star of a few good yarns told here by his niece Dean Faulkner Wells, including one about the time he careened into Memphis, dead drunk and barefoot, and placed a jug of corn liquor on the ground behind a policeman directing traffic, just to make sure it would be well guarded while he went shopping.

Author Barry Hannah, whose fiction was laced with dark humor and populated by hard-drinking Southerners, died Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 67. Hannah's son Barry Jr. told the Clarion Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., that his father died of an apparent heart attack. Hannah's first novel, "Geronimo Rex," was published in 1972. It received the William Faulkner prize for writing and was nominated for a National Book Award. His 1996 short story collection, "High Lonesome," was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

"There are two types of people in the world," announced Peter Lefcourt. "You either like Hemingway or Faulkner, never both. You either like dogs or cats, never both. You either like Bordeaux or Burgundy. You either like France or England." Lefcourt falls into the Faulkner-dogs-Burgundy-France camp--and he's written an affectionate homage to Faulkner, "Only the Dead Know Burbank" (at Sherman Oaks' Actors Alley) as proof.

William Faulkner's troubled days as a Hollywood screenwriter, like those of F. Scott Fitzgerald, are occasionally cited as evidence of Hollywood's cynical and ruinous treatment of great writers, exploited to do dreck instead of the literary masterworks they were capable of. It seems true that Faulkner was exploitively underpaid, earning $300 a week when writers of lesser esteem were making $2,000 and directors two and three times that much.

William A. Emerson Jr., who covered civil rights flash oints as part of a cadre of gutsy Southern reporters and later served as editor-in-chief of the Saturday Evening Post, has died. He was 86. Emerson, whose health had declined after a stroke, died Tuesday at his home in Atlanta. A boisterous, outsize figure in an era of colorful New York magazine editors, Emerson stood 6-foot-3, with a booming voice that took over any room. His gifts as a phrasemaker made him a sought-after speaker.

Ruth Ford, a onetime member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre who appeared in numerous Broadway plays and in films and television, has died. She was 98. Ford died Wednesday of age-related complications at her home in New York City, said her lawyer, Karin Gustafson. On Broadway, Ford appeared in plays such as "No Exit" (1946), "Miss Julie" and "The Stronger" (1956), a revival of "Dinner at Eight" (1966) and "Poor Murderer" (1976). For a 1959 Broadway production of "Requiem for a Nun" by William Faulkner, Ford costarred with her husband, Zachary Scott.