Oxford, Mississippi

The grave of beloved Southern writer William Faulkner. Because I cannot write like the master, I will leave you with his words upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949:

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before…

…the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones…

— Faulkner, 1949

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About this image

An autumn leaf lays on author William Faulkner’s grave in Oxford, Mississippi. (Photo by Carmen K. Sisson/Cloudybright)

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Carmen K. Sisson tagged cemetery, Faulkner, grave, literature, Mississippi, Oxford, religion, William Faulkner, writing