William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American novelist and short story writer, born in New Albany, Mississippi. He spent most of his life in the northern part of that state, and the region shaped nearly everything he wrote. He invented Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional place whose families, farms and towns recur across many of his books, and through it he explored the weight of the American South's history, including slavery, defeat and racial division.

Faulkner is known for bold technique: shifting narrators, tangled chronology, stream of consciousness and long, winding sentences. His work asks readers to piece together events from competing voices and memories. He also wrote humour and plain-spoken tales of rural life. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 and is widely counted among the most influential American writers of the twentieth century.