Murry Charles Falkner is best known for his book The Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir, published in 1967. Born in Ripley, Mississippi, on June 26, 1899, the second of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner's four sons, his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi in 1905. During World War I he joined the Marines and served as a private in the American Expeditionary Forces in France, where he was wounded and received the French Brigade Citation and the Purple Heart. He earned a law degree from the University of Mississippi in 1922, and for the next few years served as a lawyer in Oxford until he took a job as a special agent in the FBI. During World War II he returned to military service in the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps, where in north Africa he met, and later married, his future wife, Suzanne. He retired from the FBI in 1965. He died in Mobile, Alabama, on December 24, 1975, and was buried in Oxford.