Meet the Author
William Faulkner
American · 1897–1962 · Novelist & short-story writer
The modernist bard of the Deep South, who built a whole mythic county out of Mississippi.
4 StoryBites Editions2 Short stories
Why read William Faulkner?
Faulkner wrapped the burden of Southern history — slavery, decline, family curses — inside dense, time-scrambling prose that demands and rewards patience. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County lets generations of characters haunt one another across novels and stories. Read him for the way he makes the past refuse to stay past, and for sentences that pull you under and hold you there.
A life in six dates
- 1897Born in New Albany, Mississippi
- 1929'The Sound and the Fury' published
- 1930'A Rose for Emily' published
- 1936'Absalom, Absalom!' published
- 1949Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1962Dies in Byhalia, Mississippi
Themes across the collection
The StoryBites Editions
Context that actually matters
Southern GothicFaulkner mined the decayed grandeur and buried violence of the post-Civil War South.
Modernist techniqueHis shifting viewpoints and stream of consciousness made him a peer of Joyce and Woolf.
Influence
Echoes of William Faulkner run through Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, among many others.