William Faulkner

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”

— William Faulkner

Life & Background:

Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner crafted dense, layered stories of the American South, often inventing his own fictional county. He won the Nobel Prize in 1949.

Inspirations:

Southern history, family legacy, trauma, time, and memory. He was influenced by modernists like Joyce and Woolf.

Themes in His Work:

• The burden of the past

• Race, decay, and Southern identity

• Psychological fragmentation

• Time as non-linear and haunting

• Guilt, pride, and collapse

Notable Works:

• The Sound and the Fury

• As I Lay Dying

• Light in August

• Absalom, Absalom!