William Faulkner never finished high school and did not make it through his freshman year at the University of Mississippi in his hometown of Oxford, MS. Spending some time in New York and New Orleans, it was in the latter that he was inspired to write a novel, Soldier's Pay. The advice came from Sherwood Anderson, who recommended that Faulkner write about the rural South, a subject he knew well. From his novels and other stories, readers learned of Yoknapatawpha County, an imaginary place inhabited by people from all evils of life. Faulkner did not gain fame until he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. He won his first of two Pulitzer Prizes in 1955.