Short answers, pulled from the story.
William Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." He was the only Nobel Prize laureate born in Mississippi. The prize was formally awarded at the 1950 banquet, where the 1950 Prize was also given to Bertrand Russell.
Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional Mississippi county that Faulkner used as the setting for the majority of his novels and short stories. It was based closely on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life, and is nearly geographically identical to it. Faulkner called it his "postage stamp" of native soil.
Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Air Force in Toronto on the 10th of July, 1918, using a forged letter of reference, and was discharged on the 4th of January, 1919, after 179 days of service. He never served overseas or saw combat, and despite claiming otherwise in his letters, he never received cockpit training or flew. After returning to Oxford, he told false war stories and faked a wound.
Two of Faulkner's novels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: A Fable in 1954 and The Reivers in 1962. The Reivers was his nineteenth and final novel, completed shortly before his death. The award for A Fable was controversial because the jury had originally selected Milton Lott's The Last Hunt, but the Pulitzer board overrode that choice.
From 1932 to 1954, Faulkner worked on around fifty films as a screenwriter, arriving in Hollywood out of financial necessity. He collaborated regularly with director Howard Hawks, and wrote the screenplay for To Have and Have Not in early 1944, adapting Ernest Hemingway's novel. That film, pairing Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart for the first time, is notable as the only film with contributions by two Nobel Prize laureates.
Faulkner's influence on Latin American fiction is considered considerable by critics. Critic and translator Valerie Miles has described the fictional worlds of Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Carlos Onetti as very much in the vein of Yoknapatawpha, and has stated that Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz would not exist without As I Lay Dying. Mario Vargas Llosa also claimed that during his student years he learned more from Yoknapatawpha than from his classes.