William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962) was an American novelist and poet whose works feature his native state of Mississippi. He is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. Faulkner's writing is often criticized as being dense, meandering and difficult to understand due to his heavy use of such literary techniques as symbolism, allegory, multiple narrators and points of view, non-linear narrative, and especially stream of consciousness. Faulkner was known for an experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence, in contrast to the minimalist understatement of his peer Ernest Hemingway. Faulkner is sometimes lauded as the inventor of the "stream-of-consciousness" technique in fiction, although this is misleading; other writers, specifically the French novelists of the nineteenth century, probably used this technique first, although Faulkner, once he had discovered this way of writing, used it on a regular basis for the rest of his career, and is by far the most acclaimed American writer in this area. Along with Mark Twain and possibly Tennessee Williams, Faulkner is considered to be one of the most important Southern writers. Although his work came out on a regular basis from the mid-1920s until the late 1940s, he was relatively unknown before receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, but his work is now favored by the general public and critics.
