William Faulkner

(1897 - 1962)

Resigning from his job as postmaster at the University of Mississippi in 1924, William Faulkner wrote, “I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.” He published The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August in a three-year period. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, ending his acceptance speech by saying, “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”