William Faulkner Trivia
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48 free William Faulkner trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This William Faulkner trivia quiz covers the Mississippi novelist who built an entire fictional county and won the Nobel Prize for it. The easy questions are the ones any literature student knows: his home town, the name of his apocryphal county, the Shakespeare line behind The Sound and the Fury, and the year of his Nobel Prize. From there it moves into the life: the great-grandfather who was a Confederate colonel, the Canadian air-force stint in which he never flew, the typo that added a 'u' to his name, the post office he quit in style, and the Hollywood years with Howard Hawks. The harder end is for people who have read the novels more than once: the fifteen narrators of As I Lay Dying, the boy who says his mother is a fish, the 1,288-word sentence that made the Guinness Book, the map he drew for Absalom, Absalom!, the novel he called a potboiler, the outline written on his office wall at Rowan Oak, the Pulitzer jury that was overruled, and how his daughter found out about the Nobel. It also covers his complicated record on race and civil rights. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Faulkner, his novels, his stories and his home before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Ernest Hemingway, American literature and Nobel Prize quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Mississippi town was Faulkner born in 1897?
New Albany
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897; the family moved to Oxford in 1902, and he lived there most of his life.
Q 02Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County is a stand-in for which real Mississippi county?
Lafayette
Yoknapatawpha is modelled on Lafayette County, Mississippi, whose seat Oxford became the fictional Jefferson; Faulkner called it his 'apocryphal county'.
Q 03In what year was Faulkner awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature?
1949
Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature; the award was held over and presented at the December 1950 ceremony alongside Bertrand Russell's 1950 prize.
Q 04Which two Faulkner novels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
A Fable and The Reivers
A Fable won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and The Reivers won in 1963, the year after Faulkner's death; The Sound and the Fury never won.
Q 05How did William Clark Falkner, Faulkner's great-grandfather and a Confederate colonel, die?
Murdered by a business partner
He had been tried and acquitted twice on murder charges himself.
Q 06Faulkner never finished high school after repeating which two grades?
Eleventh and twelfth
Faulkner repeated the eleventh and twelfth grades at Oxford High School and left without a diploma; he had skipped second grade but grew withdrawn and truant as a teenager.
Q 07Which older Oxford friend with Yale and Ole Miss degrees mentored the teenage Faulkner?
Phil Stone
Phil Stone, an Oxford lawyer four years older with degrees from Ole Miss and Yale, lent Faulkner books, introduced him to modern poetry and sent his early poems to publishers.
Q 08Which service did Faulkner join in 1918, using a forged letter of reference?
The Royal Air Force (Canada)
He trained in Toronto, never flew, and came home telling false war stories with a faked wound.
Q 09What grade did Faulkner receive in English at the University of Mississippi?
D
Faulkner received a D in English at the University of Mississippi, which he attended for three semesters from 1919 under a provision for war veterans before dropping out in 1920.
Q 10From which job did Faulkner resign, refusing to be at the beck and call of anyone with two cents?
Postmaster
Faulkner was postmaster of the University of Mississippi post office from 1921 until he resigned in 1924, after a postal inspector documented his neglect of the job and patrons' complaints.
Q 11In which city did Faulkner write his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, in 1925?
New Orleans
Faulkner wrote Soldiers' Pay in New Orleans in early 1925, sharing a French Quarter apartment in Pirate's Alley with the artist William Spratling before sailing for Europe that July.
Q 12Which established writer helped get Faulkner's first two novels published?
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson, whom Faulkner met in New Orleans, recommended Soldiers' Pay to his own publisher Boni & Liveright in 1925; the firm also issued Mosquitoes in 1927.
Q 13Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel was published in 1929, heavily cut, under what title?
Sartoris
Q 21From which epic does the title As I Lay Dying come?
The Odyssey
The title comes from Book XI of Homer's Odyssey, where the shade of Agamemnon tells Odysseus in Hades how Clytemnestra would not close his eyes 'as I lay dying'.
Q 22Which 1931 Temple Drake novel was Faulkner's commercial breakthrough, one he supposedly called a potboiler?
Sanctuary
Sanctuary, the 1931 novel in which Temple Drake is abducted by the bootlegger Popeye, far outsold his earlier books and was filmed as The Story of Temple Drake in 1933.
Q 23What did Faulkner name the house he bought in 1930 and lived in until his death?
Rowan Oak
Faulkner bought the antebellum Oxford house in 1930 and named it Rowan Oak, after the rowan tree of Scottish legend said to ward off evil; he lived there until his death in 1962.
Ben Wasson cut Flags in the Dust substantially and Harcourt, Brace published it as Sartoris in January 1929; the full text appeared under the original title in 1973.
Q 14From which Shakespeare play does the title The Sound and the Fury come?
Macbeth
The title comes from Macbeth's soliloquy in Act 5 of Shakespeare's Macbeth: life 'is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.'
Q 15Which family is at the centre of The Sound and the Fury?
The Compsons
The novel follows Quentin, Benjy, Jason and Caddy over mostly a single weekend in 1928.
Q 16Whose perspective opens The Sound and the Fury?
Benjy's
Benjy Compson is intellectually disabled, and the section jumps through time without warning.
Q 17What was the title of the short story that grew into The Sound and the Fury?
Twilight
Faulkner began The Sound and the Fury in 1928 as a short story called 'Twilight', about the Compson children sent outside during their grandmother's funeral, before it grew into a novel.
Q 18Where was Faulkner working night shifts when he began As I Lay Dying in 1929?
The university power house
Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in about six weeks in late 1929 while working the night shift at the University of Mississippi power house, using an upturned wheelbarrow as a desk.
Q 19How many different narrators tell As I Lay Dying?
15
They speak across 59 chapters, one of them famously just five words long.
Q 20In As I Lay Dying, which child famously declares that his mother is a fish?
Vardaman
Vardaman, the youngest Bundren child, delivers the novel's famous one-sentence chapter, 'My mother is a fish,' as the family carts Addie's coffin to Jefferson for burial.
Q 24What did Faulkner write directly on the walls of his office at home?
The outline of A Fable
Faulkner pencilled the day-by-day outline of A Fable on the walls of his Rowan Oak office while writing the novel; it remains visible in the house, owned by the University of Mississippi since 1972.
Q 25Which studio first hired Faulkner as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1932?
MGM
MGM signed Faulkner in May 1932 at $500 a week and brought him to its Culver City lot; he reportedly asked to write Mickey Mouse cartoons, not realising Disney made them.
Q 26Which director became Faulkner's friend and frequent Hollywood collaborator?
Howard Hawks
They bonded over drinking and hunting, and Hawks's brother became Faulkner's agent.
Q 27Who shared the screenplay credit with Faulkner on the 1944 film To Have and Have Not?
Jules Furthman
Jules Furthman, Howard Hawks's regular collaborator, shared the screenplay credit with Faulkner on To Have and Have Not (1944), which reworked Hemingway's 1937 novel into a Bogart-Bacall romance.
Q 28Which Raymond Chandler novel did Faulkner help adapt for the screen?
The Big Sleep
Faulkner shared the screenplay credit for The Big Sleep (1946), Howard Hawks's adaptation of Chandler's 1939 novel, which reunited Bogart and Bacall after To Have and Have Not.
Q 29At which Hollywood restaurant was Faulkner said to go behind the bar to mix his own mint juleps?
Musso & Frank Grill
Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, a writers' haunt since 1919, preserves the legend that Faulkner stepped behind its bar to mix his own mint juleps during his screenwriting years.
Q 30A Fable, published in 1954, merged the Passion of Christ with what?
World War I's Unknown Soldier
The Pulitzer jury had chosen another book, but the board overrode them to reward Faulkner.