William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life.His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline “Callie” Barr (the African American nanny who raised him from infancy) influenced the development of Faulkner’s artistic imagination.