Born on September 25, 1897, William Faulkner belonged to a once-wealthy family of former plantation owners. Raised among a circle of acquaintances similar to General Compson and Major deSpain, Faulkner knew first-hand about life in the South after the Civil War. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County, and its county seat, Jefferson, represent the actual Lafayette County and the city of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived most of his life. Although Faulkner dropped out of high school and never finished college, he was a passionate fan of poetry and originally planned to become a poet. He worked for a brief period as a bank clerk before being accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War I, although he never saw combat action.

After working in a New York bookstore and as the university postmaster at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner began publishing stories and poems His novel The...