现代大学英语精读6(第二版)Unit2教师用书

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Unit 2
A Rose for Emily
William Faulkner

Additional Background Information on William Faulkner
William Faulkner was born and brought up in the American South and lived there for almost all
his life. On November 14, 1888, the local newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi reported a news story:
“A terrible tragedy was enacted at Ripley on Tuesday afternoon of last week—the widely and
well-known Col. W. C. Falkner being the victim.” Col. Falkner had run for the Mississippi
legislature and had been elected. But before he took office he was shot dead by his rival. Col.
Falkner had been a local hero and a legendary figure. He was a pioneer in Mississippi, organized a
regiment to fight for the South in the Civil War, practiced law after returning from the battlefields,
bought a large plantation, built the first railroad in his hometown, and wrote a novel, which
became a national best-seller. This “widely and well-known” Col. W. C. Falkner was William
Faulkner’s great-grandfather.

On September 25, 1897, Faulkner was born in this distinguished family. He spent his youth in
Oxford, a small town in Mississippi. Although the old colonel had died before Faulkner came into
this world, the boy grew up listening to all sorts of stories about his great-grandfather and other
people in his hometown. The stories that his Negro nanny told him and the gossip he heard from
the townspeople resting and chatting in the small downtown square provided Faulkner with an oral
tradition of storytelling as an important part of his education.

During World War I Faulkner served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. After the armistice in 1918
he returned to Oxford, and for some time he led his life in a rather listless way. He attended the
University of Mississippi but left the university within a year; he tried his hand at poetry but
without much success; he went north to the cultural metropolitan city of New York, but was driven
back home soon by loneliness. He became a postmaster, but after three years at most, he resigned
from this post. All this time, Faulkner had been reading, first, whatever interested him, and, later,
the great poets and novelists. In New York, Faulkner met Sherwood Anderson, a famous writer,
and then when he traveled to New Orleans in 1925, he gained entry into this artistic center through
Anderson. Inspired by Anderson, Faulkner began to write novels.

Faulkner wrote 19 novels and nearly a hundred short stories. The setting of 15 novels and the
majority of the short fiction is the American South. In his third book Sartoris (1929), he created
the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In the same year, he published The Sound and the Fury
(1929), one of his masterpieces. This novel owes much to James Joyce and the stream of