William Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner on Sept. 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. When he was three, the family moved to Oxford (Lafayette County, Mississippi), where his father operated a livery stable and his grandfather owned a bank. This became his home and, when he wrote his Yoknapatawpha Saga, this was the model for the county seat, Jefferson. After a trip to Canada in 1918, to join the Royal Canadian Flying Corps, and another to Italy and France in 1925, he settled in Oxford to write.

Most of Faulkner books were set in a fictional county modeled after Lafayette County. He called it Yoknapatawpha, after the river that runs through the south end of Lafayette County (today called the Yocona), and this became the setting of some two dozen novels and collections of short stories. His purpose was to recreate the myths and legends of the real county, presenting them as history. The end result was a microcosm of the South from before the Civil War to the Second World War, truly an American original literary creation in the tradition of Balzac's The Human Comedy. In 1950 Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1955 he received the National Book Award for Fiction. He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi.

A chronological listing of Faulkner's works:

The Marble Faun (1924), first book, a volume of poems (self-published)
Soldiers' Pay (1926), first novel (published with the help of Sherwood Anderson)
Mosquitoes (1927), based upon the lifestyle of Sherwood Anderson
Sartoris (1929), first Yoknapatawpha novel, based the Falkners
The Sound and the Fury (1929), his centerpiece for the Yoknapatawpha Saga
As I Lay Dying (1930), a short novel made up of fifty-nine monologues by fifteen different speakers
Sanctuary (1931), a potboiler written to make money
These Thirteen (1931), a collection of short stories
Light in August (1932), technically the best of the Yoknapatawpha novels
A Green Bough (1933), a collection of poems
Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), short stories
Pylon (1935), technically the sorriest of the Yoknapatawpha novels
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), one of the most difficult to understand
The Unvanquished (1938), seven long short stories that read like a novel
The Wild Palms (1939), two novelettes intertwined ("The Wild Palms" and "The Old Man")
The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of Snopes, a trilogy
Go Down, Moses (1942), seven long short stories that read like a novel
Intruder in the Dust (1948), a comic detective story
Knight's Gambit (1949), seven long short stories that read like a novel
Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950)
Requiem of a Nun (1951), sequel to Sanctuary, written like a play
A Fable (1954), not a Yoknapatawpha novel
The Town (1957), the second volume of Snopes
The Mansion (1959), the third volume of Snopes
The Reivers (1962), the last book of William Faulkner, a comedy