Faulkner's “War Birds / A Ghost Story”

A Screenplay and its Relationship with Faulkner's Fiction

Abstract

This brief essay analyzes the relations between Faulkner's film work and his fiction, in the script War Birds, which Faulkner wrote in 1932 for Howard Hawks during his first period in Hollywood, when he worked at MGM. The story is based on a diary kept by an aviator who died in World War I in France. Faulkner draws on his fictional world, on the Yoknapatawpha myth revisiting the Sartoris Clan, but something new happens. He renews the myth.