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  • Introduction: William Faulkner and World War I
  • David A. Davis

A 1931 article in The New Yorker promoting William Faulkner’s new novel Light in August describes him as “very Southern” (Cooke and Ross). The sketch of his life states that “He was born in Oxford, Mississippi, thirty-four years ago and that has been his home ever since. He owns a small cotton plantation and lives on it, with his wife and two children, in a fine old house built in 1818.” Much of this is true, but the sketch also shares a completely false portion of Faulkner’s personal narrative. It says,

In 1915 he enlisted in the Canadian air force and went to France. He crashed behind his own lines. He was hanging upside down in his plane with both legs broken when an ambulance got to him. He heard one of the men say: “He’s dead all right,” but had strength enough to deny this. After he recovered he transferred to the American air force.

While Faulkner did enlist in the Canadian air force, he did not go to France, crash upside down, or transfer to the American air force. Faulkner promulgated false stories about his military service for many years, from the time that he returned to Oxford after the war until at least World War II. His insistence on these lies indicates the importance of World War I to Faulkner personally and to his generation generally.

World War I radically reshaped social structure around the world. While the actual combat was mostly concentrated on a narrow strip of land that extended from the English Channel through eastern France to the Alps, the effects of the war could be felt across most of the globe. In Europe, the war realigned political powers, redrew the borders of several nations, and destabilized the remaining democracies. The war involved the world’s largest colonial powers, who drew upon the resources and labor of their territories for material and soldiers, and it exposed European nations’ economic dependency on their colonies. [End Page 435] The war also hastened the development of new technologies not only for warfare but also for transportation, communication, research, and production. It fundamentally changed the conditions of everyday life and led to new discoveries in science, medicine, and psychology that reshaped understandings of humanity. Because of the war, nations developed new systems of bureaucracy and taxation that laid the foundation for modern democracy while advancing the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and setting the stage for the next world war. The war changed beliefs in religion, humanism, and spirituality; it altered race relations, gender relations, and class structures; and it propelled new movements in art, design, and literature. The war, in short, affected virtually every facet of the human experience in the early twentieth century with consequences that reverberated throughout the world.

Faulkner’s experience is one clear indication of the war’s impact. When the war began, he was an undersized, awkward adolescent in rural Mississippi, filled with insecurities and unremarkable both physically and academically. When America entered the war, he aspired to distinguish himself through heroics, but he was too young for conscription and too small to volunteer. While he was disappointed in his attempt to serve in combat, the war profoundly affected his life. During the war, he left provincial North Mississippi and lived in Connecticut with his friend Phil Stone, where he worked in a Winchester firearms factory. He and Stone faked British accents and went to Toronto to enlist in the Royal Air Force. Faulkner, who added the “u” to his last name to appear more British, was a flight cadet, hoping to learn how to fly in pursuit of his aspiration to achieve heroic status. Although he did not accomplish his goal, the war changed the trajectory of his life. Because the war prompted him to leave Mississippi, Faulkner experienced urbanism, industrialism, and cosmopolitanism, and he was exposed to a range of other perspectives and ideas, in addition to all of the broader social, political, and technological changes taking place around him during the war. After the war, Faulkner was...

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