(l-r) William Faulkner and Farmington huntsman Grover Vandevender share a flask.  /  George Barkley photo

William Faulkner, two-time National Book Award, Nobel Prize, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, came to Charlottesville, Virginia from Oxford, Mississippi in the last decade of his life. He arrived two years after his daughter Jill moved to Charlottesville with her husband Paul Summers, who graduated from law school at the University of Virginia and was working as city attorney. Soon, Faulkner, Jill, and Paul were hunting with the Farmington Hunt. Jill would become Master in 1968 and serve in that capacity for forty years.

Faulkner had a reputation among hunt members for being game and fearless to his fences, despite having taken up serious foxhunting only since his arrival. He’d ridden since childhood, foxhunted in Tennessee, and loved it. However, he experienced a couple of serious riding accidents, and died in 1962 at the age of sixty-four from complications arising from a fall.