William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. He attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters without graduating. Much of his fiction is set in Yoknapatawpha County, an invented place modeled on Lafayette County.
His novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and died in Byhalia, Mississippi, in 1962.