I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.

Novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner, considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, was born this day in Mississippi in 1897. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.