William Faulkner dropped out of high school, failed a university English course, and worked as a postmaster who was fired for reading on the job. He then wrote The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! — novels so structurally radical and linguistically dense that they redefined what American fiction could do. The man who could not pass English class won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This episode traces Faulkner from his Mississippi childhood through the early failures, the Yoknapatawpha County novels that created an entire fictional world, and the Hollywood screenwriting career that funded the fiction nobody was buying.

• Faulkner’s dropout education and the early career failures that preceded his breakthrough
• The Sound and the Fury and the stream-of-consciousness technique that baffled and astonished readers
• Yoknapatawpha County — the fictional Mississippi universe that contained all of American history
• The Hollywood years writing screenplays for drinking money and the Nobel Prize that crowned his career