1897-1962
Writer

The New Regionalism.

William Faulkner, considered by many to be the greatest modern American writer, mined the nineteenth- century history of the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in his native Mississippi to create a literature that was a fusion of the American tradition of regionalism and modernism. Focusing on a few families to whom he returned in story after story, novel after novel, Faulkner examined the social structure in the Deep South. However, his fiction was anything but the local color of the earlier Regionalists. Rather, Faulkner used the modernist techniques of Eliot and Joyce to create a literature that was dazzlingly complex in form and often violent and tragic in content.

Beginnings.

William Falkner, as he was born, was raised in the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where he grew up as a dreamy, introverted child. After dropping out of high school halfway through his...