Modernist literature took shape in the early twentieth century as writers across the English-speaking world pushed against conventional narrative forms, experimenting with time, voice, and interiority in ways that had no real precedent in popular fiction. William Cuthbert Faulkner, born in New Albany on September 25, 1897, emerged from that charged literary atmosphere as an American novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter, and playwright who worked entirely in the English language.

Educated at the University of Mississippi and the University of Virginia, Faulkner brought to modernist fiction a set of concerns and techniques that the movement's broader output didn't always share. His notable works include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and the short story A Rose for Emily. He also worked in screenplays, a genre that appears among his credited output alongside the novels and stories for which he became most associated. Throughout his career he moved across multiple forms — poetry, children's writing, and drama among them — while remaining closely identified with modernist literature as a defining framework.

That body of work drew substantial critical recognition over the course of his life. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, the O. Henry Award, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and France's Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. He died on July 6, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi, with that accumulation of honors on record.