Author
William Faulkner
Birth Date
September 25, 1897
(64 Years)
Death Date
July 6, 1962
Associated Country
United States
William Faulkner (1897–1962) was an American novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He was born in New Albany and grew up in nearby Oxford, a setting that inspired much of his fiction.
Faulkner is best known for his complex narrative techniques, including stream of consciousness, shifting perspectives, and non-linear timelines. Many of his works are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, where he explored the history, culture, and racial tensions of the American South. His most famous novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
In 1949, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his powerful and artistically innovative contributions to modern fiction. Despite periods of personal struggle and fluctuating recognition during his lifetime, his work has had a lasting influence on literature worldwide.
Faulkner is best known for his complex narrative techniques, including stream of consciousness, shifting perspectives, and non-linear timelines. Many of his works are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, where he explored the history, culture, and racial tensions of the American South. His most famous novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
In 1949, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his powerful and artistically innovative contributions to modern fiction. Despite periods of personal struggle and fluctuating recognition during his lifetime, his work has had a lasting influence on literature worldwide.
Books
As I Lay Dying 2026
Faulkner’s fifth novel follows a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her final wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the...
Knight's Gambit 2024
Originally published in 1949, Knight's Gambit is a collection of six stories written in the 1930s and 1940s that focus on the criminal investigations of Gavin Stevens, the county attorney of...
Soldiers' Pay 2023
A wounded veteran's homecoming is at the center of Faulkner's first novel. Badly scarred in body and mind, and unable to remember much, Donald Mahon is brought home at the end of the World War I by a...
Mosquitoes 2023
Wealthy Mrs. Maurier, the widowed heiress of an old New Orleans family, likes to collect "artistic types." When she plans a multi-day outing on her yacht and manages to corral aboard a group that...
Flags in the Dust 2012
Set in the fictional town of Jefferson in the American South, Flags in the Dust traces the decline of the once-prominent Sartoris family in the years following World War I. At its center is young...
Requiem for a Nun 2012
This sequel to Faulkner’s most sensational, Sanctuary, was written twenty years later but takes up the story of Temple Drake eight years after the events related in Sanctuary. Temple is now married to...
A Fable 2011
Set during World War I on the Western Front, A Fable centers on a mysterious French corporal who leads a group of soldiers in a quiet but radical act of defiance: they refuse to continue fighting....
Pylon 2011
One of the few of William Faulkner’s works to be set outside his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Pylon, first published in 1935, takes place at an air show in a thinly disguised New Orleans named New...
The Town 2011
The Snopes, Book 2
This is the second volume of Faulkner’s trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South. Like its predecessor, The Hamlet, and its successor,...
The Mansion 2011
The Snopes, Book 3
The Mansion completes Faulkner’s great trilogy of the Snopes family in the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, which also includes The Hamlet and The Town. Beginning with the murder of Jack...
This invaluable volume contains some of the greatest short fiction by a writer who defined the course of American literature. Its forty-five stories fall into three categories: those not included in...
Forty-two stories make up this magisterial collection by the writer who stands at the pinnacle of modern American fiction. Compressing an epic expanse of vision into hard and wounding narratives,...
The Wild Palms 1995
In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the...
Big Woods 1994
"The Bear, " "The Old People, " "A Bear Hunt, " "Race at Morning"--some of Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner's most famous stories are collected in this volume--in which he observed,...
Sanctuary 1993
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction. Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of...
William Faulkner was a master of the short story. Most of the pieces in this collection are drawn from the greatest period in his writing life, the fifteen or so years beginning in 1929, when he...
The Reivers 1992
Set in early 20th-century Mississippi, The Reivers follows eleven-year-old Lucius Priest as he embarks on what begins as an innocent adventure but quickly becomes a journey into the complexities of...
The Hamlet 1991
The Snopes, Book 1
The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its...
The Unvanquished 1991
Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, THE UNVANQUISHED focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old...
Intruder in the Dust 1991
A classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black who has long refused to adopt the black's traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused...
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin;...
Light in August 1991
Light in August features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions...
Absalom, Absalom! 1991
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, a man who comes to the South in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a...
Go Down, Moses 1991
Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing...