William Faulkner is an American literary giant. His works are highly celebrated for their intensity, depth of prose, and southern gothic style, all of which have profoundly influenced the course of modern American literature.

Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi to a well known, southern family. His grandfather, after whom he was named, was a successful businessman, planter, Civil War colonel, and bestselling author of the book, The White Rose of Memphis (1881). The “Old Colonel”, as he was called, was an inspirational patriarch for his male descendants, William Faulkner included.

In his youth, Faulkner was a bright student who demonstrated promising talents in poetry and writing. However, as he grew older, he grew bored of school, and never received a high school diploma. As a young man, he attempted to join the U.S. Air Force during WWI but was turned down due to his short stature. Reeling from the rejection, Faulker tried his hand at the British Royal Airforce, lying about his birthplace and age on his application to land a meeting with recruits. He even faked a British accent and misspelled his last name as “Faulkner” to sound more English. His lies worked, and he was invited to serve as a cadet in the RAF at the tail-end of WWI.

Before he was ever called to war, however, Faulkner worked for Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut, on the employee records was the first time Falkner’s last name was ever officially spelled Faulkner. Not long after taking this job he was drafted for training with the Royal Air Force in Canada. However the war ended before training finished, so he never fulfilled his military ambition. Ultimately, Faulkner returned to Mississippi and enrolled in the University of Mississippi at Oxford where he spent three semesters. He submitted poetry, artwork, and short stories to the campus newspaper The Mississippian while he attended and kept contributing even after he eventually dropped out.

Following his short-lived college career, Faulkner worked odd jobs and traveled while working to launch a literary career. His first poems and manuscripts were met with middling success. He reached a breakthrough, by finally taking advice from a colleague: write about your native region. Faulkner has stated that after doing just this, he felt liberated to write freely. The fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, inspired by his youth, would serve as the setting and inspiration for almost all of his novels.

His first two novels Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury, both published in 1929, kick-started his trajectory into literary stardom. However, even after their critical success, he still could not become a full-time writer. In the same year, he married old flame Estelle Oldham, who brought into the marriage two children. To support them, Faulkner took a night shift job at a power plant, working through the nights, and writing through the days.

Despite his crushing schedule, between 1930 and 1932, Faulkner managed to published three sensation novels: novels, As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932), each steeped in nostalgia for the antebellum era, and portraying the decay of the Post-Reconstruction south. From the fall of wealthy aristocratic antebellum families whose demise was brought on by their own decadence in The Sound and the Fury, to the struggles of poor southern farmers in As I Lay Dying, Faulkner is well known for utilizing the modernist literary technique “stream of consciousness” to explore his characters’ unspoken thoughts. This technique is notably recognized in The Sound and the Fury through the character Benjamin, or Benji, the intellectually disabled oldest brother of the Compson family, who provides the point of view for the first section of the novel.

1932 also began Faulkner’s ventures as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He worked on seven major films such as The Big Sleep and other television programs. He worked in Hollywood consistently from 1932 to 1954, which allowed him to provide for Estelle and the children.

Faulkner established himself as a high modernist, screenwriter, and literary titan. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, a National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. Towards the end of his career, he served as the writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia for a few weeks a year. His work has lived on to influence other great American authors such as Cormac McCarthy. Faulkner died on his grandfather’s birthday July 7th, 1962 of a heart attack leaving behind an iconic legacy.