William Faulkner

William Faulkner was an American novelist and short story writer whose best work is set in Yoknapatawpha County, an invented corner of Mississippi standing in for the Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. Across a dozen novels he built one continuous social history out of it, following the same families down the generations and letting the same events be retold by narrators who flatly disagree. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, and is generally treated as the central figure of Southern literature. He also published poetry and worked, on and off, as a Hollywood screenwriter.