William Faulkner did not look like a future Nobel Prize winner. He was a high school dropout who forged documents to join the Canadian Royal Air Force, added a U to his last name to seem more British, and came home to Mississippi faking a war wound and a limp for a war he never fought in. This episode traces how that restless myth-maker, haunted by a great-grandfather who was a Confederate colonel, railroad builder, novelist, and twice-acquitted murder defendant, turned his own small patch of Mississippi into one of the most ambitious fictional universes in American literature.

We follow Faulkner from his disastrous stint as a university postmaster to New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson told him to write about the dirt he actually knew. That advice produced Yoknapatawpha County, the Compsons and Snopes, stream of consciousness prose, and As I Lay Dying written in six weeks on a wheelbarrow desk during night shifts at a power plant. We also cover his two decades of screenwriting at MGM and for Howard Hawks, his revival through The Portable Faulkner, the 1949 Nobel Prize, and the difficult contradiction between his empathetic fiction and his go-slow stance on civil rights that James Baldwin and others sharply criticized.

• Why Faulkner faked a limp and combat stories after World War I ended before he could fly
• How Sherwood Anderson and modernist prose unlocked the creation of Yoknapatawpha County
• What Southern Gothic and stream of consciousness actually mean on the page
• The Hollywood years: 50 films, adapting Hemingway and Chandler, and mixing his own mint juleps
• His Nobel Prize, his views on desegregation, and his influence on Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy