William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Mississippi. He is regarded as one of America's most influential fiction writers.

Faulkner was known for using long, serpentine sentences and meticulously chosen diction, in stark contrast to the minimalist style of his longtime rival, Ernest Hemingway. Some consider Faulkner to be the only true American Modernist prose fiction writer of the 1930s, following in the experimental tradition of European writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. His work is known for literary devices like stream of consciousness, multiple narrations or points of view, and narrative time shifts.

Along with Mark Twain and possibly Tennessee Williams, Faulkner is of the highest level of importance of "Southern" writers. Despite his current ubiquitousness both on popular bookshelves and academic reading lists, he was relatively unknown before being shot to fame with a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 ^[1].