So, this is pretty cool.
William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize winning author and Oxford resident, who also studied at the University of Mississippi. You may have heard of him. He wrote many literary classics at his home, Rowan Oak, which UM now owns and operates.
But, in addition to being one of the most well-known 20th-century authors, Faulkner was also pretty great at drawing. I recently ran across an article complete with some of Faulkner’s illustrations for the UM literary magazine, which he did as a young Oxford man who hadn’t yet become internationally famous.
From Brain Pickings: “In 1916, as he was about to turn twenty, Faulkner began contributing poems and sketches to the Mississippian, the literary magazine at Ole Miss — the University of Mississippi, in which he would enroll three years later for a brief three-semester stint before dropping out in 1920. But Faulkner continued to draw for the magazine until 1925 — shortly before he penned the aforementioned little-known children’s book while courting his future wife — even earning small commissions for his drawings, largely inspired by Aubrey Beardsley …”
One of William Faulkner's drawings for The Mississippian
To see the full Brain Pickings post on Faulkner’s lesser known skills with a pen, along with the rest of the author’s drawings, click this link to the Brain Pickings website.