Which novelist created the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha?

Faulkner, who invented a Mississippi county and set fifteen novels and dozens of stories in it, drew a map of it himself, and labelled it sole owner and proprietor. Characters recur across books at different ages, families accumulate history, and events are retold from incompatible points of view - so the county exists as a body of contradictory testimony rather than as a described place.

The prose is the barrier. Sentences run for pages, chronology collapses, and one section of The Sound and the Fury is narrated by a man with severe cognitive disability with no signposting at all. He wrote it partly because he had given up on selling books - he said he was writing that novel for himself, having decided nobody would publish it.

By the 1940s almost everything he had written was out of print and he was writing screenplays in Hollywood for money. A single critical anthology in 1946 revived him, and the Nobel followed in 1949. His acceptance speech - that the writer's duty is to the human heart in conflict with itself, and that man will not merely endure but prevail - was delivered in an accent so thick and a voice so quiet that the audience could not make it out, and it only became famous when it was printed.