William Cuthbert Faulkner was born as William Cuthbert Falkner on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. He later changed the spelling of his name, in consequence of a regrettable publisher's mistake. Faulkner was one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th Century in America. In the year 1901 the four years old William Cuthbert Faulkner and his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi. Already at a young age he showed artistic talent, writing poetry and drawing, stamped by his great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, who founded the literary tradition in the family as a best-seller writer. For the reason that his first ambition was to be a poet, in 1924 his poems were collected and published in "The Marble Faun". At that time he earned his livelihood as a Journalist, until he wrote his first novel "Soldiers' Pay" in 1926, supported and influenced by the author Sherwood Anderson. Faulkners work was influenced by his family and the life at the Mississippi. This is why the most of his short stories and novels were located in the fictive Yoknapatawpha County and its capital city Jefferson. This fiction is based on his hometown Oxford and the State of Mississippi, in which Faulkner raised up. With the special focus on writing novels, Faulkner earned increasingly critical recognition and also greater financial rewards from his writing. His regular life was as exciting and tough as his professional life. After some disagreements he married the love of his youth Estelle Oldham in the year 1929. William Cuthbert Faulkner had a lifelong drinking problem. But it seems probable, that this was to bear the pressures of his regular life, he obviously never drank while writing. Faulkner published in his 64 years lifetime besides poems twenty novels and a great number of short stories. Further the author worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, after an invitation of Howard Hawks. William Cuthbert Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for literature for 1949. Also he won two Pulitzer Prizes. The first one in the year 1955 for his novel "A Fable", which was also honored with the National Book Award in 1955, and the second one for the novel "The Receivers" in 1963. For his "Collected Stories" he received the National Book Award in 1951. From 1957 until his death of a heart-attack in the year 1962 he worked as a "Writer-in-Residence" at the University of Virginia.