William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American Nobel Prize-winning writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, essays, and plays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories, which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.
Faulkner is one of the most famous writers in American literature in general and Southern literature in particular. Although his works were published since 1919 and mostly during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner’s fame reached its peak with the publication of Malcolm Cowley’s Faulkner the Carrier and his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, making him the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fairy Tale (1954) and his final novel, The Reavers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; the list also included As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom Absalom appears on similar lists.