American novelist whose mostly self-contained fictional county — Yoknapatawpha, the imagined Mississippi of almost all his major work — is the most ambitious imaginative construction in American literature and won him the 1949 Nobel Prize. Faulkner is the reverse pole of Hemingway's clarity: long, recursive, unpunctuated sentences; multiple narrators whose accounts conflict; a prose that pushes against the limits of syntax because the experience it wants to render — time layered on itself, the past refusing to be past, memory and myth and guilt all active at once — cannot be held in ordinary English.
His great decade (1929–1942) produced a run of novels that still defines American modernism: The Sound and the Fury (1929), whose four narrators circle the decay of the Compson family; As I Lay Dying (1930), the Bundren family's journey to bury their mother told in fifteen voices; Light in August (1932), on race, pregnancy, and violence; Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the densest of them — a novel about the Civil War, the South's original sin, and the epistemology of historical knowledge; and Go Down, Moses (1942), the McCaslin stories turning on the land and its entanglements of kinship and race.
Faulkner's central preoccupation is the weight of history — especially the Southern history of slavery, defeat, and the persistence of both in the psychic and social life of the region. "The past is never dead. It's not even past." His influence on subsequent Southern writing (Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Cormac McCarthy), on Latin American magical realism (García Márquez called him indispensable), and on world literature generally is larger than any 20th-century American novelist except Hemingway.