William Faulkner (1897–1962) was born in New Albany, Mississippi, to a prominent Southern family and spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi. He dropped out of high school and, except for one year as a student at the University of Mississippi, had no further formal education. His first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), published through the help of acclaimed fiction writer Sherwood Anderson, earned him an advance of two hundred dollars each on his next two novels. Recalling those events, he is reported to have said, "I liked that money," and to have noted that Anderson "worked only in the morning," which seemed to him "a mighty easy way to earn money." Whether or not it was easy, Faulkner spent most of his adult life earning his living as a writer.

Most of his many novels are set in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and tell stories related to the decline of traditional Southern ways of life. Long, sonorous sentences with abundant details are one of the hallmarks of Faulkner's style. He also experimented considerably with point of view, telling the stories in some of his novels from the points of view of several different characters, including that of a mentally challenged man in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and those of a mentally deficient poor white family in As I Lay Dying (1930). Much of Faulkner's fiction employed a stream-of-consciousness mode, presenting characters' random thoughts, feelings, and impressions in interior monologues.

In addition to his novels, Faulkner wrote screenplays, the most notable of which are his adaptations of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Faulkner's work was recognized in 1950 with a Nobel Prize for literature and two Pulitzer Prizes in 1954 and 1962, among other awards and honors. Other works by Faulkner include The Marble Faun (poetry, 1924), Mosquitoes (1927), Sartoris (1929), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), and Intruder in the Dust (1948).