One of the world’s greatest writers, William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897–1962) was born on this day in New Albany, Mississippi. A high school dropout, he once confessed, “I’m just a farmer who likes to tell stories.”

In 1924, he published his first book, The Marble Faun, a collection of poetry. He went on to write twenty novels and dozens of short stories, using a dense, layered style that celebrated complexity and multiple points of view.

“The aim of every artist,” he said, “is to arrest motion.”

A chronicler of the American South, Faulkner created the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a vivid landscape of belles and plantations, segregation and intolerance, heroism and poverty. Life and death in the South.

His essay Mississippi described his complicated love for his hometown: “Loving all of it… because you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.”

Faulkner believed literature should capture “the agony and sweat of the human spirit.” In 1949, he became the first American novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after World War II.

“Man is immortal,” Faulkner said, “because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, and by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.”

Named to the Top 100 Writers of the 20th Century, William Faulkner wrote with fire and sorrow. Linger with the others... Each voice a bloom in the garden of literature.