Celebrations Today – September 25

Holidays and observances

• Armed Forces Day or Revolution Day (Mozambique)
• Christian feast day:
  • Abadir and Iraja and companions (Coptic Church)
  • Cadoc
  • Ceolfrith
  • Cosmas and Damian (Roman Catholic Church in Canada)
  • Finbarr
  • Lancelot Andrewes (Calendar of saints (Church of England)
  • Sergius of Radonezh (repose)
  • September 25 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
• Earliest day on which Maple Leaf Day can fall, while September 31 is the latest; celebrated on the last Wednesday in September. (Canada)
• Day of National Recognition for the Harkis (France)
• National Youth Day (Nauru)

Celebrations Today – USA: September 25

National One-Hit Wonder Day
National Comic Book Day
National Tune-Up Day
National Research Administrator Day
Math Storytelling Day
International Ataxia Awareness Day
National Cooking Day
National Crab Meat Newburg Day
National Food Service Employees Day
National Psychotherapy Day
World Pharmacist Day

Today in US History: September 25

William Faulkner

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.From Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III, by William Faulkner

William Faulkner,
Carl Van Vechten, photographer,
December 11, 1954.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1964

Novelist William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He spent much of his youth in Oxford where his father was employed as the secretary and then business manager for the University of Mississippi.

Faulkner was the creator of the mythical Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. He portrayed a landscape of universal themes through decayed Southern white gentry, merchants, farmers, poor whites, and persecuted blacks.  In stories notable for their experimental narrative techniques, he wrote about the troubled legacy of race, the conflicts between the values of the agrarian Old South and the industrial New South, and dysfunction both within the family and within the larger community. Faulkner’s characters confront institutionalized racial violence and intimate crime while struggling to live with dignity, meaning, and compassion, often in the face of degradation and humiliation.

William Faulkner left high school before graduating and attended university only briefly, dropping out in the first semester of his sophomore year. Despondent over a love affair and inspired by aspirations for military glory, he joined the Canadian Royal Air Force but never saw active service. Upon returning to Oxford, he was appointed postmaster of the University of Mississippi, a job he was unable to maintain.

Tell about the South.  What’s it like there.  What do they do there. Why do they live there.  Why do they live at all. . . .
“Now I want you to tell me just one more thing.  Why do you hate the South?”
“I dont hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark;I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!From Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Faulkner lived for a short time in New Orleans, where he received encouragement from writer Sherwood Anderson. He also traveled to France and Italy, though he made no attempt to meet any of the Lost Generation of expatriate American artists who had settled in Europe after World War I. Aside from these ventures and stints as a Hollywood screenwriter, Faulkner spent the remainder of his life in Mississippi and Virginia, writing brilliantly and prolifically in isolation from his peers.

After his third novel was rejected by the publisher Horace Liveright for its “diffuse” plot and characterization, Faulkner assumed that his work would not receive public recognition, but he was determined to continue writing for his own fulfillment. In fact, he achieved notice with his very next novel, The Sound and the Fury, which was praised by most reviewers upon its publication in October 1929. He continued to publish novels and poems for the next three decades. Faulkner was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, in 1955 for A Fable, and in 1963 for The Reivers. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” During his brief acceptance speech, Faulkner spoke of the human condition and the writer’s duty in the nuclear era:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.William Faulkner,
“Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech“

Two Women Walking Along Street,
Natchez, Mississippi,
Ben Shahn, photographer, October 1935.

Wife of Negro Sharecropper,
Lee County, Mississippi
Arthur Rothstein, photographer, August 1935.

Playing Dominoes or Cards in Front of Drug Store in Center of Town,
Mississippi Delta, Mississippi,
Marion Post Wolcott, photographer, October 1939.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945

• American Memory has a rich collection of photographs of the Mississippi landscape that inspired Faulkner’s fiction. To find similar images from the 1930s and 1940s, search the collection America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945 on keywords such as cotton, sharecropper, tenant, or farmer, or browse the State Index on place names such as Mississippi–Lauderdale County.
• Search on the keywords Oxford, Mississippi, in Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, 1933-Present to see examples of Lafayette County, Mississippi, architecture, including Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner, and buildings such as the Lyceum Building of the University of Mississippi.
• Search the Today in History Archive on terms such as writer or poet to read about other American literary lights such as James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes.
• Faulkner’s writing is enriched by the Southern vernacular speech, sometimes melodious, sometimes comic or pathetic. The South’s strong tradition of oral history and storytelling is captured in the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project interviews, found online in American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940.
• Learn about Faulkner’s contemporaries in Voices from the Thirties. The Federal Writers’ Project provided jobs for a diverse assortment of unemployed white-collar workers including beginning and experienced writers, those who had always been poor, and the newly down and out. Among the project’s writers who went on to gain national literary reputations were Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, May Swenson, Margaret Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright.

Today in History – September 25-External Links

Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia