Editing William Faulkner (section)

===Childhood and heritage===
[[File:William Clark Falkner.jpg|thumb|Faulkner was influenced by stories of [[William Clark Falkner]], his paternal great-grandfather and namesake.]]
Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in [[New Albany, Mississippi]],<ref>[[#Minter|Minter (1980)]], p. 1.</ref> the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler.<ref name= "Ole Miss">[http://www.olemiss.edu/mwp/dir/faulkner_william/ MWP: William Faulkner (1897–1962)] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151101145349/http://www.olemiss.edu/mwp/dir/faulkner_william/ |date= November 1, 2015 }}, OleMiss.edu; accessed September 26, 2017.</ref> His family was upper middle-class, but "not quite of [[Planter class|the old feudal cotton aristocracy]]".<ref name="obit">{{cite news |date=July 7, 1962 |title=Faulkner's Home, Family and Heritage Were Genesis of Yoknapatawpha County |work=The New York Times |url= https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0925.html |url-status= live |access-date=June 17, 2021 |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20201218054512/https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0925.html |archive-date=December 18, 2020}}</ref> After Maud rejected Murry's plan to become a rancher in Texas,<ref>[[#Minter|Minter (1980)]], p. 7.</ref> the family moved to [[Oxford, Mississippi|Oxford]], Mississippi in 1902,<ref name="Minter 1980, p. 8">[[#Minter|Minter (1980)]], p. 8.</ref> where Faulkner's father established a livery stable and hardware store before becoming the [[University of Mississippi]]'s business manager.<ref>[[#O'Connor|O'Connor (1959)]], p. 4.</ref><ref name="Minter 1980, p. 8"/> Except for short periods elsewhere, Faulkner lived in Oxford for the rest of his life.<ref name="Ole Miss"/><ref name="Nobel Prize">{{Nobelprize}}</ref>

Faulkner spent his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders – stories that spanned the [[American Civil War|Civil War]], slavery, the [[Ku Klux Klan]], and the Faulkner family.<ref name="ReferenceA">Minter, David L. ''William Faulkner, His Life and Work''. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; {{ISBN|0-8018-2347-1}}</ref> Young William was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of "[[African Americans|black]] and [[White Americans|white]]" [[Americans]], his characterization of Southern characters, and his timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people who are dwelling behind the façades of good ol' boys and simpletons.<ref>{{Cite magazine |date=2020-11-18 |title=William Faulkner's Demons |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/william-faulkners-demons |access-date=2023-03-03 |magazine=The New Yorker |language=en-US}}</ref> He was particularly influenced by stories of his great-grandfather [[William Clark Falkner]], who had become a near legendary figure in North Mississippi. Born into poverty, the elder Falkner was a strict disciplinarian and was a Confederate colonel. Tried and acquitted twice on charges of murder, he became a member of the [[Mississippi House of Representatives|Mississippi House]] and became a part-owner of a railroad before being murdered by his co-owner. Faulkner incorporated many aspects of his great-grandfather's biography into his later works.<ref>[[#O'Connor|O'Connor (1959)]], pp. 4–5.</ref>
<!--His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline "Callie" Barr (the African American nanny who raised him from infancy) influenced the development of Faulkner's artistic imagination. Both his mother and his grandmother were avid readers as well as painters and photographers, educating him in visual language. While Murry enjoyed the outdoors and encouraged his sons to hunt, track, and fish, Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church. She taught her sons to read before she sent them to public school and she also exposed them to literary classics such as the works of [[Charles Dickens]] and the [[Grimms' Fairy Tales]].<ref name="ReferenceA">Minter, David L. ''William Faulkner, His Life and Work''. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; {{ISBN|0-8018-2347-1}}</ref>-->

Faulkner initially excelled in school and skipped the second grade. However, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades, he became a quieter and more withdrawn child. He occasionally played truant and became indifferent about schoolwork. Instead, he took an interest in studying the [[history of Mississippi]]. The decline of his performance in school continued, and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh and twelfth grades, never graduating from high school.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> As a teenager in Oxford, Faulkner dated Estelle Oldham (1897–1972), the popular daughter of Major Lemuel and Lida Oldham, and he also believed he would marry her.<ref>[[#Parini|Parini (2004)]], pp. 22–29.</ref> However, Estelle dated other boys during their romance, and, in 1918, [[Cornell Franklin]] (five years Faulkner's senior) proposed marriage to her before Faulkner did. She accepted.<ref name="Parini 2004 pp. 36">[[#Parini|Parini (2004)]], pp. 36–37.</ref>{{efn|group=note|He proposed marriage to her before Faulkner did. Her parents insisted she marry Franklin for various reasons: he was an Ole Miss law graduate, had recently been commissioned as a major in the [[Hawaii Army National Guard]], and came from a respectable family with whom they were old friends.<ref name="Parini 2004 pp. 36"/>}}