Will AI make writers extinct? William Faulkner helps me answer that question.

There are three questions I’m asked repeatedly these days: when my next novel will be published, which writer inspired me most, and whether I’m terrified that AI is replacing the craft and art of writing. The first is bound by confidentiality, so let me answer the second and third once and for all.

Most people assume that as an espionage and thriller novelist, I only read within my genre, or that the great spy writers are my sole source of inspiration. I’ve learned that the best writers read eclectically, far beyond their area of interest. Storytelling is universal and genre-blind. You can find tension and adrenaline in romance, shocking plot twists in historical fiction, deep philosophical questions in young adult books, and tender, heart-melting moments in the most muscular thrillers. I grew up as an expat child in Africa, and more often than not, we read what was available.

Which brings me to the second question. Perhaps not the writer who most influenced my storytelling voice, but the writer who first showed me the power anyone can wield with words: William Faulkner. I stumbled on a tattered copy of As I Lay Dying at a second-hand book sale at the American Embassy Marine House in Tanzania in the mid-1980s. Flipping through, I was intrigued that there were no chapter numbers or titles, just names of characters – fifteen of them, some with multiple entries. It took me months to finish because, at twelve or thirteen, the book was far more complex than what I was reading at the time (Enid Blyton, Sue Townsend). It would be decades before I read it again as an adult and understood how blessed I’d been to encounter Faulkner so young, to be shaped by one of the greatest writers of our time.

And that brings me to the third question: Will AI make writing an extinct profession? Will generative AI kill art entirely?

Pondering this, I ask myself another question: Do we enjoy art purely for its entertainment value – the “hit” – or are we also invested in the artist? I know where I stand. The minute I finish a book, watch a film, attend a play, or experience a painting that moves me deeply, I can barely wait to research the artist behind it. Art consumed for its own sake is meaningless and soulless if experienced outside the wider context that gave birth to it. This is true even for art I find abhorrent – I’m equally curious about the artists behind the drivel.

Others argue that my view is elitist, or that culture will evolve to a point where art becomes fully commodified rather than an integrated experience. Perhaps. But this is precisely what’s at stake with AI-generated writing. Faulkner’s experimental structure in As I Lay Dying – those fifteen voices, that fractured narrative – emerged from his own grief, his financial desperation, his determination to write something no one had written before. The book’s power doesn’t exist separately from the man who wrote it while working night shifts at a power plant, who revised in stolen hours, who poured his Mississippi into every page. An algorithm can mimic the structure. It cannot replicate the necessity.

Late last year, my relationship with Faulkner came full circle when I was asked to write the foreword for the new Deluxe Edition of As I Lay Dying. Ninety-five years since it was published. Forty years since my adolescent hands turned those first pages. In celebrating the artist behind the art, I wanted to share insight into William Faulkner’s life – the context that makes his work indelible – before readers encounter As I Lay Dying or any of his works. Because that context, that human story, is what no machine can generate. It’s what makes art matter.

William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and grew up in nearby Oxford, a small Southern town that would become both his anchor and his imaginative terrain. The region shaped him deeply, not as a romantic inheritance but as a site of unresolved history, social rigidity and moral tension. Faulkner would later insist that he wrote about what he knew, but what he knew was not simply place. It was the weight of memory, the persistence of failure and the uneasy coexistence of pride and decay.

Faulkner’s family history was marked by both distinction and decline. His great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, had been a successful businessman, soldier and popular novelist, a figure of local legend whose shadow lingered over the family. By the time Faulkner was born, that prominence had faded. The family’s financial instability and sense of diminished status would later surface in his fiction as a preoccupation with inheritance, loss and the burden of legacy.

As a young man, Faulkner was not an obvious literary prodigy. He struggled in school, showed little interest in formal education and left the University of Mississippi without completing a degree. During the First World War, he attempted to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rejected. He eventually joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, though the war ended before he saw combat. This brief and largely imagined military experience became part of the personal mythology he cultivated, reflecting his lifelong tension between aspiration and reality.

After the war, Faulkner drifted through a series of occupations. He worked as a clerk, a postmaster, a carpenter. None of these roles suited him, and he failed at most of them. He was dismissed from his job as postmaster at the University of Mississippi for neglecting his duties in favor of writing. These years of instability were formative. They sharpened his sense of marginality and reinforced his belief that writing was not a vocation one chose lightly, but an obsession one endured.

Faulkner’s early literary efforts met with limited success. His first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), received modest attention but failed to establish him as a major voice. Mosquitoes (1927), a satirical novel about bohemian life, was widely regarded as uneven and indulgent. Publishers were skeptical. Sales were disappointing. Faulkner later dismissed these works as necessary failures, exercises that allowed him to discover what he could not do.

The turning point came with The Sound and the Fury (1929). Commercially unsuccessful at first, the novel marked a decisive shift in ambition and form. Its fractured structure, shifting perspectives and experimental use of time announced a writer no longer interested in pleasing readers or conforming to expectations. As I Lay Dying followed in 1930, written with extraordinary speed and confidence. Together, these novels established Faulkner’s central concerns: the instability of memory, the limits of language and the moral complexity of human endurance.

Despite these artistic breakthroughs, Faulkner remained financially insecure. To support himself, he turned to screenwriting in Hollywood, a compromise he regarded with ambivalence. He worked intermittently for major studios, contributing to scripts while maintaining a distance from the industry. Hollywood provided income but not fulfillment. Faulkner saw it as a necessary concession rather than a creative home.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Faulkner produced a body of work that expanded and deepened his fictional universe. Novels such as Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses further explored the imagined county of Yoknapatawpha, a landscape that allowed him to examine Southern history without reducing it to nostalgia or condemnation. His treatment of race, class and violence was often controversial, marked by both insight and limitation. Faulkner confronted the legacy of slavery and segregation obliquely, sometimes powerfully, sometimes problematically. His work reflects the tensions of a man both shaped by and resistant to his cultural inheritance.

Recognition came slowly. Faulkner’s reputation grew first in Europe, where critics embraced his formal experimentation and moral seriousness. In the United States, he was often regarded as difficult, obscure or willfully inaccessible. It was not until after the Second World War that his stature was widely acknowledged at home.

In 1950, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that surprised him and altered his public standing. His Nobel address, delivered the following year, articulated a vision of literature grounded in endurance and moral courage. He spoke of the writer’s duty to address “the old verities and truths of the heart,” emphasizing compassion, sacrifice and perseverance. The speech is often cited as a key statement of his artistic philosophy, though it stands in tension with the unresolved darkness of much of his fiction.

In his later years, Faulkner became a public figure, giving lectures and participating in interviews that offered insight into his methods and beliefs. These appearances revealed a writer wary of explanation and resistant to critical simplification. Faulkner often downplayed symbolism, rejected allegorical readings and emphasized craft over interpretation. He viewed writing as labor rather than inspiration, insisting that discipline mattered more than talent.

Despite his accolades, Faulkner’s personal life was marked by struggle. He battled alcoholism for much of his adult life, a condition that affected his health and relationships. His marriage to Estelle Oldham was turbulent, marked by separation and reconciliation. Faulkner’s periods of productivity alternated with periods of illness and withdrawal, reinforcing the sense of a life lived in cycles rather than progression.

Faulkner continued to write into the 1950s, though his later novels are often regarded as less cohesive than his earlier work. Still, they reflect an ongoing engagement with the themes that defined his career. He never abandoned Yoknapatawpha. He never relinquished his interest in how history inhabits the present.

William Faulkner died on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi, from complications related to a fall. He was sixty-four years old. At the time of his death, his reputation was secure but not universally embraced. In the decades since, his standing has only grown. He is now regarded as one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, a figure whose influence extends across continents and generations.

Faulkner’s legacy is not one of comfort. His novels resist summary. They demand patience, attention and a tolerance for ambiguity. He did not offer solutions or consolations. He offered witness. His work insists that history does not pass cleanly, that language does not clarify without cost and that endurance is often indistinguishable from survival.

In an era increasingly defined by immediacy and certainty, Faulkner’s refusal to simplify remains instructive. His fiction challenges readers to confront complexity without evasion and to accept that meaning is provisional, incomplete and contested. That challenge has not diminished with time.

William Faulkner did not write to reassure. He wrote to expose. In doing so, he expanded the possibilities of the novel and left behind a body of work that continues to test the limits of narrative, empathy, and understanding.

I hope you find in Faulkner’s work or life what I found forty years ago: proof that words, crafted with necessity and care, can mean everything to someone.

Click here to read the 95-year anniversary, Deluxe Edition of As I Lay Dying.