William Faulkner

William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897 and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. His novels charting the decay of the American South’s old guard are virtually synonymous with “Southern literature” as a genre. In The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and other novels and works of short fiction, Faulkner fuses modernist techniques, such as stream-of-consciousness, with explorations of class, race, and questions surrounding family. He won numerous awards, including the 1954 and 1962 Pulitzer Prizes in Fiction and the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died of a heart attack in 1962.

Illustration by William Faulkner