William Faulkner

William Faulkner spent nearly all his life in Oxford, Mississippi, and turned the county around it into Yoknapatawpha, the setting of the novels and stories in which the South’s history of slavery, defeat and decline is told by voices that cannot stop telling it. The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! are the great novels; A Rose for Emily and The Bear, the story of a boy, a hunt and the wilderness’s end, are the pieces the lists assign. He wrote Hollywood scripts for money and won the Nobel Prize in 1949, when most of his books were out of print.