Portrait of Faulkner in 1954 by Carl van Vechten. William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962) was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career, but is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories. Faulkner is one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States. He won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." He suffered serious injuries in a horse-riding accident in 1959, and died from a myocardial infarction in 1962. He was 64 years old. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).