William Faulkner

1897–1962 · American (Oxford, Mississippi) · American Modernism, Southern Renaissance

Known for: Creator of Yoknapatawpha County—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom! Nobel Prize 1949

William Faulkner was a heavy-drinking, taciturn Mississippian who lied about serving in World War I, worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood (he hated it), and produced the most structurally innovative novels in American literature. His sentences can run for pages, his narratives jump between timeframes and consciousnesses, and his subject matter—the guilt, violence, and decay of the American South—is unflinching.

He created the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a complete Southern world populated by generations of families whose stories interweave across novels. He won the Nobel Prize in 1949. He was quietly kind to neighbors, devoted to his daughter Jill, and dismissive of literary fame.

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