William Faulkner

1897–1962
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native
soil was worth writing about and that I would never
live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the
actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to
use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top.
—Interview, The Paris Review (1956)
He was born September 25, 1897, in New Albany,
Mississippi
his first book, a poetry collection titled The Marble Faun
(1926).
Novels: Soldiers’ Pay (1926),
 Mosquitoes (1927),
 Sartoris (1929).
 The Sound and the Fury (1929),
 As I Lay Dying (1930)
 Sanctuary (1931),
 Light in August (1932)
 Absalom, Absalom! (1936),
 The Wild Palms, (1939)
Most of Faulkner’s fiction after Sartoris was
set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County—
his “postage stamp of native soil”—which
was based closely on Lafayette
County,Mississippi.

He had been experimenting with stylistic

innovations, his experimentation reached
new heights as he employed modernistic
techniques such as fragmented prose,
stream of consciousness, and broken time
The Civil War is a crucial element in
Absalom, Absalom! and other Faulkner
Faulkner’s writing style—whose rhetorical complexity is a
marked contrast to the work of his contemporaries such as
F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—is notable for its
innovations in narrative technique, but equally compelling
are
the philosophical, cultural, and sociological ramifications of
his fiction. His novels, particularly those set in
Yoknapatawpha
County, may be read as an epic chronicle of Southern life

awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for 1949