William Cuthbert Faulkner, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in New Albany on September 25, 1897, and moved with his family to Oxford as a child. He made an indelible mark on American letters by bringing a modernist literary sensibility to storytelling about his native South. His representations of class, race, history, and the land, set in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha, are drawn in vivid detail in novels such as Sartoris: The Sound and the Fury: As I Lay Dying; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; The Hamlet: Go Down Moses; and others. He won the Pulitzer Prize for A Fable, whose outline is penciled on the walls of his office here at Rowan Oak, and for The Reivers, published in the year of his death. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he observed that “the human heart in conflict with itself” is the theme of all good writing. Faulkner died July 6, 1962.