When William Faulkner received the nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, he completed an emergence from comparative obscurity that had begun three years before. Since then, Faulkner has achieved the status of a world author. his works have been painstakingly translated into many languages, and perhaps more critical books and articles have been written about him in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries than about any other writer with the exception of William Shakespeare. Faulkner’s achievement has been compared favorably with the achievements of henry James, honoré de Balzac, and Charles Dickens; many critics regard him as the preeminent novelist of the twentieth century