Faulk·ner also Falk·ner (fôk'nər) American writer who set many of his works, such as the novels The Sound and the Fury (1929) and The Unvanquished (1938), in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, a microcosm of the postbellum South, in which he explored the decay of traditional Southern culture and the relations between the races. He won the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature. Faulk·ner'i·an (fôk-nîr'ē-ən) adj.