Born William Cuthbert Falkner (he changed the spelling of his last name upon the publication of his first book), on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. Faulkner's father was the business manager of the University of Mississippi in the town of Oxford, and his mother was a literary woman who encouraged Faulkner and his three brothers to read.

More than simply a renowned Mississippi writer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story writer is acclaimed throughout the world as one of this century's greatest writers, one who transformed his "postage stamp" of native soil into an apocryphal setitbusng in which he explored, articulated, and challenged "the old verities and truths of the heart." During his period of greatest artistic achievement, from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to Go Down, Moses in 1942, Faulkner accomplished in a little over a decade more artistically than most writers accomplish over a lifetime of writing. It is one of the more remarkable feats of American literature, how a young man who never graduated from high school, never received a college degree, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, all the while balancing a growing family of dependents and impending financial ruin, could during the Great Depression write a series of novels all set in the same small Southern county - As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and above all, Absalom, Absalom! - that would one day be recognized as among the greatest novels ever written by an American.

William demonstrated artistic talent at a young age, drawing and writing poetry, but around the sixth grade he began to grow increasingly bored with his studies. His earliest literary efforts were romantic, conscientiously modeled on English poets such as Burns, Thomson, Housman, and Swinburne. While still in his youth, he also made the acquaintance of two individuals who would play an important role in his future: a childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and a literary mentor, Phil Stone.

Faulkner was a good student, but lost interest in studies during high school. He dropped out in his sophomore year, and took a series of odd jobs while writing poetry. In 1918, his high school girlfriend, Estelle Oldham, married another man, and Faulkner left Mississippi. He joined the British Royal Flying Corps, but World War I ended before he finished his training in Canada, and he returned to Mississippi.

Though he had seen no combat in his wartime military service, upon returning to Oxford in December 1918, he allowed others to believe he had. He told many stories of his adventures in the RAF, most of which were highly exaggerated or patently untrue, including injuries that had left him in constant pain and with a silver plate in his head. A neighbor funded the publication of his first book of poems, The Marble Faun (1924) and his brief service in the RAF would also serve him in his written fiction, particularly in his first published novel, Soldiers' Pay, in 1926.

In 1919, he enrolled at the University of Mississippi in Oxford under a special provision for war veterans, even though he had never graduated from high school. In August, his first published poem, "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune" [sic], appeared in The New Republic. While a student at Ole Miss, he published poems and short stories in the campus newspaper, the Mississippian, and submitted artwork for the university annual. In the fall of 1920, Faulkner helped found a dramatic club on campus called "The Marionettes," for which he wrote a one-act play titled The Marionettes but which was never staged. After three semesters of study at Ole Miss, he dropped out in November 1920.

In January 1925, Faulkner moved to New Orleans and fell in with a literary crowd which included Sherwood Anderson (author of Winesburg, Ohio) and centered around The Double Dealer, a literary magazine whose credits include the first published works of Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson.

Faulkner sailed from New Orleans to Europe, arriving in Italy on August 2, 1925. His principal residence during the next several months was near Paris, France, just around the corner from the Luxembourg Gardens, where he spent much of his time; his written description of the gardens would later be revised for the closing of his novel Sanctuary. While in France, he would sometimes go to the cafe that James Joyce would frequent, but the interminably shy Faulkner never mustered the nerve to speak to him. After visiting England, he returned to the United States in December.

Again in New Orleans, he began working on his second novel, Mosquitoes, a satirical novel with characters based closely upon his literary milieu in New Orleans; set aboard a yacht in Lake Pontchartrain, the novel is today considered one of Faulkner's weakest. For his third novel, however, Faulkner considered some advice Anderson had given him, that he should write about his native region. In doing so, he drew upon both regional geography and family history (particularly his great-grandfather's Civil War and post-war exploits) to create "Yocona" County, later renamed "Yoknapatawpha."

In 1929, Faulkner finally married Estelle Oldham Franklin, who had divorced her first husband after having two children. The couple bought a ruined mansion near Oxford and began restoring it while Faulkner finished The Sound and the Fury, published in October, 1929. The book opens with the interior monologue of a developmentally disabled mute character. His next book, As I Lay Dying (1930) featured 59 different interior monologues. Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom (1936) also challenged traditional forms of fiction.

After The Sound and the Fury was published in October 1929, Faulkner had to turn his attention to making money. Earlier that year, he had written Sanctuary, a novel which Faulkner later claimed in an introduction he conceived "deliberately to make money." Because of its sordid subject the novel was immediately turned down by the publisher. Faulkner's need for income stemmed largely from his growing family. Faulkner, now working nights at a power plant, wrote As I Lay Dying, later claiming it was a "tour de force" and that he had written it "in six weeks, without changing a word."

Though his hyperbolic claims about the novel were not entirely true, As I Lay Dying is nevertheless a masterfully written successor to The Sound and the Fury. As with the earlier work, the novel focuses on a family and is told stream-of-conscious style by different narrators, but rather than an aristocratic family, the focus here is on lower-class farm laborers from southern Yoknapatawpha County, the Bundrens, whose matriarch, Addie, has died and had asked to be buried in Jefferson, "a day's hard ride away" to the north. The journey to Jefferson is fraught with perils of fire and flood (from the rain-swollen Yoknapatawpha River) as well as the family members' inner feelings of grief and loss. The novel would be published in October 1930.

Faulkner's difficult novels did not earn him enough money to support his family, so he supplemented his income selling short stories to magazines and working as a Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote two critically acclaimed films, both starring Humphrey Bogart. To Have and have Not was based on an Ernest Hemingway novel, and The Big Sleep was based on a mystery by Raymond Chandler.

In April 1930, Faulkner saw the first national publication of a short story he had written, A Rose for Emily, in Forum magazine. It would be followed that year by "Honor" in American Mercury, "Thrift", and "Red Leaves", both in the Saturday Evening Post. Over the coming years, as sales of his novels sagged, he would write numerous short stories for publication, especially in the Saturday Evening Post, as a principal means of financial support.

That same year, his publisher had a change of heart about publishing Sanctuary and sent galley proofs to Faulkner for proofreading, but Faulkner decided, at considerable personal expense, to drastically revise the novel. The novel, which features the rape and kidnaping of an Ole Miss coed, Temple Drake, by a sinister bootlegger named Popeye, shocked and horrified readers, particularly in Oxford; published in February 1931, Sanctuary would be Faulkner's best-selling novel until The Wild Palms was published in 1939.

Faulkner's first collection of short stories, These 13, would be published in September 1931 and he began writing a novel tentatively titled Dark House, which would feature a man of uncertain racial lineage who, as an orphaned child, was named Joe Christmas. In this, Faulkner's first major exploration of race, he examines the lives of outcasts in Yoknapatawpha County, including Joanna Burden, the granddaughter and sister of civil rights activists gunned down in the town square; the Rev. The novel would be published as Light in August in October 1932 by his new publisher of Harrison Smith and Robert Haas.

In April 1934, Faulkner published a second collection of stories, Doctor Martino and Other Stories. That spring, he began a series of Civil War stories to be sold to The Saturday Evening Post. Faulkner would later revise and collect them together to form the novel The Unvanquished (1938). In March 1935, he published the non-Yoknapatawpha novel Pylon, which was inspired apparently by the death of Captain Merle Nelson during an air show on February 14, 1934, at the inauguration of an airport in New Orleans.

Back in Oxford in January 1936, Faulkner spent what would be the first of many stays at Wright's Sanatarium, a nursing home facility in Byhalia, Mississippi, where Faulkner would go to recover from his drinking binges.

In October 1936 he published a new novel called Absalon, Absalom! alluding to King David's lament over his dead son in the Old Testament, by Random House.

Back at Rowan Oak in September 1937, Faulkner began working on a new novel, which would consist of two short novellas with two completely separate casts of characters appearing alternately throughout the book. Faulkner's title for the book was If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, consisting of the novellas The Wild Palms and Old Man.

In February 1938, Random House published The Unvanquished, a novel consisting of seven stories, six of which had originally appeared in an earlier form in The Saturday Evening Post. A kind of "prequel" to Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, The Unvanquished tells the earlier history of the Sartoris family during and immediately after the Civil War, focusing especially on Bayard Sartoris, son of the legendary Colonel John Sartoris who, like Faulkner's real-life great-grandfather, was gunned down in the street by a former business partner.

While in New York in the fall of 1938, Faulkner began writing a short story, "Barn Burning," which would be published in Harper's the following year. But Faulkner was not finished with the story. He had in mind a trilogy about the Snopes family, a lower-class rural laboring white family who, unlike the Compsons and Sartorises of other Faulkner novels, had little regard for southern tradition, heritage, or lineage. The Snopes, often regarded as Faulkner's metaphor for the rising "redneck" middle class in the South, more interested in avaricious commercial gain than honor or pride, were to be led in the trilogy by the enterprising Flem Snopes, who in the original story "Barn Burning" had appeared only briefly as the eldest son of Ab Snopes.

In January 1939 If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem was published under the title The Wild Palms. In April 1940, the first book of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, was published by Random House.

Throughout 1941, Faulkner spent much of his time writing and reworking stories into an episodic novel about the McCaslin family, several members of whom had appeared briefly in The Unvanquished. Though several stories that would comprise Go Down, Moses had been published separately, Faulkner revised extensively the parts that would comprise the novel, which spans more than 100 years in the history of Yoknapatawpha County. The book was published in May 1942 as Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, but in subsequent editions, Faulkner had the phrase "and other stories" omitted, insisting to his publisher that the book was a novel.

In 1944, Faulkner began a correspondence with Malcolm Cowley, who at the time was editing The Portable Hemingway for Viking Press. Faulkner's reputation received a significant boost with the publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946), which included his many stories set in Yoknapatawpha county. Three years later, in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. His Collected Stories (1950) won the National Book Award, and A Fable (1954) won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. He was writer in residence at the University of Virginia from 1957-58 and lectured frequently on university campuses. Faulkner's later works included The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962). He died of a heart attack in Mississippi at age 65.

Selected works:

• Soldier's Pay (1926)
• Mosquitoes (1927)
• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• Sartoris (1929)
• As I Lay Dying (1930)
• Sanctuary (1931)
• Light in August (1932)
• Pylon (1935)
• Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
• The Unvanquished (1938)
• The Wild Palms (1939)
• The Hamlet (1940)
• Go Down Moses (1942)
• Intruder in the Dust (1948)
• Knight's Gambit (1949)
• Collected Stories (1950)
• Requiem for a Nun (1951)
• A Fable (1951)
• The Town (1957)
• The Mansion (1959)
• The Reivers (1963)
• Mayday (1976)
• The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (1979)
• Vision in Spring (1984)