William Faulkner

William Faulkner invented Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional corner of Mississippi, and wrote fourteen novels about it. It was his own world, and he knew every inhabitant and every road in it.

He was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. He never finished school. He worked as a postmaster and was dismissed for negligence. He lived in New Orleans, then in Europe.

The Sound and the Fury (1929) tells the story of the Compson family from four points of view, one of them belonging to Benjy, an idiot. As I Lay Dying (1930) follows a farming family carrying a coffin across a flooded river.

Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, Light in August — Mississippi, racism, a past that will not die.

The Nobel Prize came in 1949. He died in 1962.