The Hamlet

Born in 1897, William Faulkner grew up in an upper middle class Southern family in Mississippi. After a series of jobs, including a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Faulkner began to publish poems and short stories, eventually moving to New Orleans. There he focused on writing full time, finishing his novel The Sound and the Fury in 1928. He and his wife moved back to Mississippi and in 1931 bought a house in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford. He continued writing until his death in 1962, with most of his works focusing on Southern life. Faulkner was considered a modernist writer and a leading practitioner of the style known as Southern Gothic, and his works are considered an important picture of the Southern United States within the literary canon.

Many of Faulkner’s stories and novels take place in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a fictional county based off on Faulkner’s own experiences and observations of Mississippi. These stories often focus on the post-bellum South, documenting what Faulkner perceived as a declining Southern society obsessed with an idealized fantasy of its antebellum past. Many of the characters in these stories, including many of the main characters of The Hamlet, appear in multiple works set in Yoknapatawpha. The county first appeared in Faulkner’s writing with the publication of his story Sartoris, in 1929. Faulkner developed the history of Yoknapatawpha County by combining facts about the region with fictional characters, places, and interpersonal relationships.