Picture of William Faulkner

Original caption:Author William Faulkner and his wife, Estelle, stand outside Rowan Oak, their home near Oxford. In his biography Faulkner (Random House), Joseph Blotner relates how Faulkner knew Estelle in childhood and married her in 1929 after her divorce from a previous spouse. Blotner also writes that the first publisher of The Sound and the Fury paid Faulkner an advance of $200, and that the book sold less than 2,000 copies in its first two years of life.