Novelist · 1897 – 1962
William Faulkner
Key Takeaways
- Faulkner set most of his fiction in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
- His novels use stream of consciousness and shifting perspectives.
- He explored the history, guilt and decline of the American South.
- He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.
William Faulkner took a small corner of Mississippi and turned it into one of the great imaginary worlds of literature. Across novel after novel set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, he traced the history, guilt and decline of the American South.
The modernist of the South
Faulkner brought the boldest techniques of modernism to America. The Sound and the Fury tells its story through several minds, including one incapable of ordering time; As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! layer voices and memories into dense, demanding fiction. Adapting the stream-of-consciousness method of James Joyce, he reinvented the American novel.
A lasting influence
Where his contemporary Ernest Hemingway wrote with stark simplicity, Faulkner spun vast, winding sentences — and both won the Nobel Prize. His treatment of Southern history shaped later writers from Toni Morrison to the magical realists of Latin America, making this novelist of the modern era one of the most influential authors of the century.
Influence
Faulkner brought high modernist technique to the American novel, his experiments with time and voice influencing writers across the world, especially in Latin America and the South.
Legacy
His imaginary Mississippi county became one of literature's great fictional worlds, and his work the benchmark for ambitious American fiction.
Major Works
- The Sound and the Fury
- As I Lay Dying
- Absalom, Absalom!
Connections
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was William Faulkner?
William Faulkner (1897–1962) was an American novelist, author of The Sound and the Fury, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his modernist fiction of the American South.
What is Yoknapatawpha County?
It is the fictional Mississippi county Faulkner invented as the setting for most of his novels, a richly detailed world used to explore the history of the American South.
Citations & Sources
People Like William
Ernest Hemingway
82Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer whose spare, understated prose style revolutionized 20th-century fiction, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for works such as The Old Man and the Sea.
Why A contemporary American Nobel laureate whose spare style contrasted sharply with Faulkner's dense prose.
James Joyce
82James Joyce was an Irish novelist whose experimental masterpiece Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century, and whose innovations in language and stream of consciousness transformed modern literature.
Why A modernist whose stream-of-consciousness technique Faulkner adapted for the American South.
Toni Morrison
81Toni Morrison was an American novelist whose richly poetic explorations of Black American life — above all Beloved — won her the Pulitzer Prize and made her the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Why A later novelist who studied Faulkner's treatment of Southern history and answered it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
80F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist and short-story writer, the great chronicler of the Jazz Age, whose novel The Great Gatsby is often called the quintessential American novel.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Herman Melville
80Herman Melville was an American novelist and poet whose Moby-Dick, neglected in his lifetime, is now regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written and a towering achievement of American literature.
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Mark Twain
84Mark Twain was an American writer and humorist, called the "father of American literature", whose novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn captured the voice of America and remain classics of world literature.
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