Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Light in August is on Time magazine's 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present (source).
Faulkner's a lover, not a fighter. He spent most of his early years thinking that he was a poet. Unfortunately, he wasn't a very good one. We're glad that he turned to novels. If you want to check out his juvenilia (that's work written when he was just a wee lad), then pick up this book of love poems (source).
Faulkner, Hollywood hero? For several years in the 1930s-40s, Faulkner actually wanted to ditch his career as a world-famous novelist and become a world-famous screenwriter. He actually moved away from Mississippi and got a place in Hollywood – where he wrote screenplays for Howard Hawks (Hawks was a pretty hot director at the time) (source).
Faulkner had a serious writer's crush on James Joyce. Here's what he said about Ulysses: "You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith" (source).
Ernest Hemingway's take on Faulkner: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." All we can say is – Ouch. (source).