William Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American Southern literature, and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature made him the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Also on the list were Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).
William Spratling was an American silver designer and artist, best known for his influence on twentieth-century Mexican silver design. He accepted a position as an instructor at Tulane University’s School of Architecture in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1921. At the same time, he was an active participant in the Arts and Crafts Club and taught in the New Orleans Art School. Spratling roomed with author William Faulkner during his time in New Orleans, and the two famously collaborated on Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, which depicted the bohemian atmosphere of artists and writers like themselves living and working in the French Quarter in the 1920s.
