William Faulkner is widely regarded not only as the greatest American novelist but also as one of the great novelists of world literature. Born September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, the small town that provided inspiration for his novels. He began his writing career as a poet, but soon turned to prose, although he retained a poetic, flowery style. His first novel, Soldier's Pa (1926), was a typical postwar novel of disillusion. Mosquitoes (1927), a Huxley-style novel of ideas, concerned a group of artists and intellectuals. Not until Flags in the Dust did Faulkner find inspiration in his Southern heritage. He invented the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, modeled after his own Oxford, and peopled it with dozens of characters based on his family and townsmen, most of whom reappear in later novels. In the Southern setting Faulkner found...