Famous Author Mentorships: William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson

Anderson, an established writer in New Orleans, encouraged Faulkner to focus on novels and write about his native Mississippi region, leading to works like The Sound and the Fury.

 

Faulkner reflects on the most important thing Anderson taught him about being a writer:


"I learned that, to be a writer, one has first got to be what he is, what he was born; that to be an American and a writer, one does not necessarily have to pay lip-service to any conventional American image… You had only to remember what you were."

Decades later, Faulkner would remember Anderson as his sole important mentor in a beautiful 1953 piece originally published in The Atlantic as “Sherwood Anderson: An Appreciation.”