William Faulkner

William Faulkner spent nearly all his life in and around Oxford, Mississippi, and invented a county to hold it. Yoknapatawpha County, with its seat at Jefferson, appears in most of his novels and stories, a place of fallen planter families, poor white farmers, Black families bound to them by blood and history, and memories of the Civil War that will not fade. He drew a map of it for one book and signed it as sole owner and proprietor.

Between 1929 and 1942 he produced one of the most remarkable runs in American fiction. The Sound and the Fury tells the decline of the Compson family through four narrators, the first a mentally disabled man for whom past and present are the same. As I Lay Dying follows a poor family carrying their mother's coffin to town. Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! confront race and lineage head-on. The books were difficult, sold poorly, and were mostly out of print by the mid-1940s.

To support his family Faulkner wrote for Hollywood, working on screenplays including To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. Then in 1946 the critic Malcolm Cowley published The Portable Faulkner, which made the Yoknapatawpha saga visible as a whole and revived his reputation. In 1950 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949. In his acceptance speech he said he believed that man will not merely endure, he will prevail.

One of his characters observes that the past is never dead, that it is not even past, a line that has become a shorthand for the South and for American history generally. In the 1950s Faulkner spoke against segregation but urged the North to go slow, and some of his public remarks on race were contradictory and damaging. He won two Pulitzer Prizes late in life and died in 1962. Writers from Gabriel García Márquez to Toni Morrison counted him as an influence.