Portal:Literature/Biography archive/2006, Week 39

William 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.