William Faulkner has been called the greatest American fiction writer of this century. It is for this reason that he won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzer Prizes. Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Miss., and grew up in Oxford, Miss. It is there that he researched the culture and geography to create his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the county seat of which is Jefferson. The characters in many of Faulkner's works appear in more than one piece of literature, except for the Bundren family, who are unique to "As I Lay Dying." Faulkner is probably most noted for his broad range of narrations including stream-of-consciousness (As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury) and alternating between prose and a play (Requiem for a Nun).
Most of Faulkner's writing was influenced by where he lived. Almost all of his novels take place in the fictional Oknapatawpha County of Mississippi. He wrote about the traditions and history of the South. Also, Faulkner was influenced by such American fictionists as Mark Twain, and his novels can be seen to parallel the laid-back adventure found in Twain's novels. Many of his novels include discussions on mixed-race societies. Common themes that prevail in Faulkner's novels are the South, tragedy, and creating several characters to emphasize the difficulty of determining the truth. Although Faulkner has been criticized for the violence and corruption in his novels, he has noted that these were used to emphasize what he refers to as the "eternal verities." By contrasting what he believes people should possess (honor, love, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice) with the immoral qualities his characters possess, Faulkner is in fact criticizing society. These are the main driving forces behind his works.