William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He published his first book,ย The Marble Faun, in 1924, but it is as a literary chronicler of life in the Deep Southโparticularly in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the setting for several of his novelsโthat he is most highly regarded. In such novels asย The Sound and the Fury,ย As I Lay Dying,ย Light in August, andย Absalom, Absalom!ย he explored the full range of postโCivil War Southern life, focusing both on the personal histories of his characters and on the moral uncertainties of an increasingly dissolute society. In combining the use of symbolism with a stream-of-consciousness technique, he created a new approach to fiction writing. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. William Faulkner died in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 6, 1962.