William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, to upper-middle-class parents. The family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1902, and except for brief travels elsewhere, Faulkner spent the rest of his life there. Faulkner was greatly influenced by the stories of his family and lineage, which extended as far back as his great-grandfather, William Clark Faulkner, who was a colossal figure in North Mississippian history. Faulkner grew up listening to stories of his ancestors, which were deeply rooted in the history of the American South, slavery, and the Civil War; his engagement with oral storytelling, memory, and generational lineages bounded by geography would go on to play a significant role in his fiction, which was also rooted in family histories and genealogies within Mississippi. In his teens, Faulkner was introduced to the work of James Joyce, a key figure in the Modernist literary movement; this was one of Faulkner’s earliest exposures to the stylistic literary innovations that would come to mark his own novels later on.

On multiple occasions, Faulkner tried to join the US Army but was rejected. In 1929, Faulkner published Sartoris, which was his first novel that dealt with the Civil War, followed shortly after by The Sound and the Fury.