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Faulkner, William (Cuthbert) (1897-1962)

US novelist. His works employ difficult narrative styles in their epic mapping of a quasi-imaginary region of the American South. His third novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), deals with the decline of a Southern family, told in four voices, beginning with an especially complex stream-of-consciousness narrative. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

Main works

Later works using highly complex structures include As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). These were followed by a less experimental trilogy - The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959) - covering the rise of the materialistic Snopes family. Oxford, Mississippi, was his model for the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County, the setting of his major novels. He was recognized as one of America's greatest writers only after World War II.

Life Faulkner was born in Mississippi and educated at Mississippi University. He served in the Canadian air force in World War I and was wounded in France; his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1929), is about a war veteran. After the war he returned to Oxford, Mississippi.

Other works Further notable novels are Sartoris (1929), The Unvanquished (1938) (stories of the Civil War), The Wild Palms (1939), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1953, dramatized 1955), and The Reivers (1962).

He also published several volumes of short stories, including Idyll in the Desert (1931), Dr Martino (1934), and Go Down Moses (1942). Faulkner's poetry includes The Marble Faun (1924), Salmagundi (1932), and The Green Bough (1933).

Big Sleep, The

Mississippi (state)

novel

Sound and The Fury, The

Southern US fiction