William Faulkner, Pascagoula Novelist

William Faulkner, Pascagoula Novelist. . William Faulkner (1897-1962) is considered one of the great Southern writers. Faulkner is traditionally associated with northern Mississippi. For much of his life, Oxford, Mississippi was his home, and many of his stories were set in his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi. What is not so well known is that he spent time in Pascagoula and penned novels here. , Phil Stone, an Oxford attorney, was one of the first to note Faulkner's talent and took on the role of his mentor. One of Stone's in-laws was Frank Lewis, a Pascagoula businessman, community leader, and developer of the Jackson County pecan industry. The Lewis family owned a beachfront cottage in Pascagoula, which was offered to Faulkner as a writer's getaway. Here the writer summered in 1925-26 producing his second novel, Mosquitoes, and started on his third, The Wild Palms. The photograph shows him writing under the oak, which still exists, at the 1305 Beach Boulevard location. , While in Pascagoula Faulkner fell in love with a local belle, Helen Baird. Faulkner subsequently dedicated both Mosquitoes and Wild Palms to Helen. But their marriage was not to be. Their lifestyles were too different; she Southern aristocrat, he more Bohemian. However, scholars say the character in Wild Palms was modeled from her. , His association with Pascagoula did continue. When Helen Baird married another in 1927, Faulkner presented her a handwritten book of love poems, Helen: A Courtship and Mississippi Poems, which was later published. In turn when Faulkner married in 1929 he came to Pascagoula for his honeymoon. Faulkner returned to visit Pascagoula one more time in 1955. It is said that while strolling the beach he encountered Helen Baird and they talked for a while. What passed between them after so many years is only for conjecture. , The world remembers Faulkner as a southern literary giant, winning the Nobel Prize in literature (1949) and two Pulitzer Prizes. He produced novels, short stories, poems, plays, screenplays, and essays. He pioneered the "stream of consciousness technique" where a person's thoughts are portrayed in a loose narrative fashion. His works include: The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers, and Absalom, Absalom!, In Pascagoula he is recalled as a quiet man, spending hours in his writing, who liked sailing and trips to Horn Island. Rosebud Leatherbury, life-long resident, recalls that in the evening while the adults were "doing their thing" he would gather her and the other children around and "tell us great stories."