William Faulkner, considered one of the great Southern writers, is traditionally associated with northern Mississippi, where Oxford was home for much of his life and where many of his stories were set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Less well known is his connection to Pascagoula, where Phil Stone, an Oxford attorney who recognized Faulkner's talent and mentored him, helped open a retreat at the beachfront cottage of his in-laws, the family of Pascagoula businessman and community leader Frank Lewis. Faulkner spent the summers of 1925-26 there, producing his second novel, Mosquitoes, and beginning his third, The Wild Palms, writing under an oak at 1305 Beach Boulevard. While in Pascagoula he fell in love with Helen Baird, a local belle, and later dedicated both Mosquitoes and Wild Palms to her, though they did not marry because their lifestyles were too different. Scholars say a character in Wild Palms was modeled on her. His ties to Pascagoula continued after Helen Baird married another in 1927, when he gave her a handwritten book of love poems, Helen: A Courtship and Mississippi Poems, later published. After his own marriage in 1929, he came to Pascagoula for his honeymoon, and he returned once more in 1955, when he is said to have met Helen Baird while walking on the beach. Remembered worldwide as a southern literary giant, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949 and two Pulitzer Prizes, produced novels, short stories, poems, plays, screenplays, and essays, and pioneered the stream of consciousness technique. His works include The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers, and Absalom, Absalom! In Pascagoula he was recalled as a quiet man who spent long hours writing, enjoyed sailing and trips to Horn Island, and told great stories to local children in the evenings.