William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, as the oldest of four sons of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud (Butler) Faulkner. While he was still a child, the family settled in Oxford in north-central Mississippi. Faulkner lived most of his life in the town. About the age of 13, he began to write poetry. At the Oxford High School he played quarterback on football team and suffered a broken nose.

    "I liked the cartoons better than the poetry," recalled later George W. Healy Jr., who edited the magazine. In 1920 Faulkner left the university without taking a degree. Years later he wrote in a letter, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made." Faulkner moved to New York City, where he worked as a clerk in a bookstore, and then returned to Oxford. For a time Faulkner supported himself as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi, but was fired for reading on the job. He drifted to New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson encouraged him to write fiction rather than poetry. The early works of Faulkner bear witness to his reading of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, and the fin-de-siècle English poetry. His first book was The Marble Faun (1924), a collection of poems. It did not gain success. After a hiatus in Paris, he published Soldier's Play (1926). The novel centered on the return of a soldier, who has been physically and psychologically disabled in WW I. It was followed by Mosquitoes, a satirical portrait of Bohemian life, artist and intellectuals, in New Orleans.
    In 1929 Faulkner wrote Sartoris, the first of fifteen novels set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region of Mississippi-actually Yoknapatawpha was Lafayette County. The Chickasaw Indian term meant "water passes slowly through flatlands." Sartoris was later reissued entitled Flags in the Dust (1973). The Yoknapatawpha novels spanned the decades of economic decline from the American Civil War through the Depression. Racism, class division, family as both life force and curse, are the recurring themes along with recurring characters and places. Faulkner used various writing styles. The narrative varies from the traditional storytelling Light in August to series of snapshots As I Lay Dying or collage The Sound and the Fury. Go Down, Moses (1942) was a short story cycle about Yoknapatawpha blacks and includes one of Faulkner's most frequently anthologized stories, 'The Bear', about a ritual hunt, standing as a symbol of accepting traditional cultural values.
    In 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham Franklin, his childhood sweetheart, who had divorced his first husband, a lawyer. Next year he purchased the traditional Southern pillared house in Oxford, which he named Rowan Oak. Architecture was important for the author-he obsessively restored his own house, named his books after buildings and depicted them carefully: With The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first masterwork, Faulkner gained recognition as a writer. Its title originated from the famous lines in Shakespeare's play Macbeth: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." While working at an electrical power station in a nightshift job, Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying (1930), about the illness, death, and burial of Addie Bundren. The book consists of interior monologues, most of them spoken by members of the Bundren family. The deceased herself has one monologue; her dying wish is to be buried in her home town. Struggling through flood and fire the family carries her coffin to the graveyard in Jefferson, Mississippi. Ultimately, the journey becomes Addie's curse. "Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever." Cash, Addie's son, breaks his leg, Darl, another son, attempts to cremate his mother's body by setting fire to the barn, and Dewey Dell is raped in the cellar of a pharmacy. Addie is buried next to her father in the family plot. Darl's sanity dies with her mother and he is taken finally to an asylum. Anse, the father, appears with a woman, introducing her as the new 'Mrs Bundren'.
    Faulkner is a prominent figure of southern fiction who followed modernist techniques but became regionalist in his writing. He created a mythical country in North Mississippi called Yoknopatawpha of which the country seat is Jefferson. From 1925 until his death in 1962 his major novels are based on this fictions world the world of Yoknapatawpha. His mythical Yoknapatawpha country became one of the most famous mini worlds in twentieth century literature. Faulkner’s major issue is the tension between myth and history. Faulkner mixes the mythical tradition and ceremonial world which is the underlying subject of Faulkner’s work. Faulkner novels are divided in to first and second cycles. The first cycle of Yokhapatwpho novels include stories, The sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, High in August and Absalom, Absalom. In these novels the major issue is the tension between myth and history. Sartoris is the first novel of Faulkner and the foundation of the Yoknapatawpha country on which the writer established most of his regionalist vision. This novel created background for Faulkner’s further writing presenting an image of Colonel John as the protection for Sartoris/ Yoknapatawpha. Similarly the second cycle of Yoknapatwpha novels include Intrudes in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, The Town, The Mansion and The Rivers. In these novels, the major issue is to construct a myth of man, which transcendent the history of man’s condition. However the second cycle of Yoknapatwpha novels was not as impressive as the novels of the first. Besides, there is also a non –Yoknapatwpha novel of Faulkner written in 1954-A Fable. This novel is also an amalgam (mixture) of mythical tradition and ceremonial world. But this novel for which Faulkner spent ten long years is the largest non –Yoknapatwpha work counted as his one genuine failure. However from 1950 to 1975 in the post world war age, William Faulkner is among three main figures that stand out among the southern novelists and the remaining two are Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty.