Of Hemingway & Faulkner

Credit:Alfred Eris, Some Time in the Sun

Above is the great midcentury Mississippi novelist William Faulkner in Hollywood writing a screenplay that has nothing to do with Yoknapatawpha county.

By Megan McKinney

The Big Sleep, a 1939 novel by Raymond Chandler, appeared on the silver screen in 1946 as a film noir, directed by the great Howard Hawks.

Howard Hawks at work

The Hollywood hit, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, featured a screenplay from the typewriter of William Faulkner, along with co-writers Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman.

Above is a postcard showing the exterior of Mr. Faulkner’s California home, the penthouse of an apartment building, known as Hotel Highland Towers.

credit:jaredpaulstern.com

Novelist Williiam Faulkner enjoyed the Hollywood of December 1942, when not even Oxford, Mississippi was warm enough for this outfit

It was a time when “everyone” smoked cigarettes and the American public was fascinated by The Big Sleep stars, who had met while filming To Have and Have Not, their first film together, which was loosely based on Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel of the same name.

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Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart away from the studio

The Big Sleep starred Humphrey Bogart as private detective Philip Marlowe, and Lauren Bacall, in a story that began with blackmail and went on to murder after murder.

Both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway participated in the writing ofTo Have and Have Not, making it the only film story in which two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature contributed their talents.

Mr. Heminway received the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

SpencerTracy was the Old Man in the 1958 film from the Nobel Prize-winning Hemingway novella.

Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman starred together in her first Technicolor film, For Whom the Bell Tolls, in 1943. The movie was based on the 1940 Ernest Hemingway novel, also titled For Whom the Bell Tolls. .