Nobel Prize Award Speech
...I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but 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....
American novelist and short story writer. Apart from a short time in military service and a period spent writing screenplays in Hollywood, Faulkner lived his whole life in his native Mississippi. He attended the University of Mississippi, in the town of Oxford, and much of his writing depicts life in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, an imaginative reconstruction of the area near Oxford. With the help of the author Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner published his first novel, Soldier's Pay, in 1926. His major novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom! Absalom! (1936). His Collected Stories (1950) won the National Book Award, as did A Fable (1954); he also twice received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1949 Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. See also nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laure ates/1949/faulkner-bio.html. 