What is the name of the fictional county created by William Faulkner?

The fictional county created by William Faulkner is Yoknapatawpha County. It is Faulkner’s invented Mississippi setting, a literary landscape modeled largely on Lafayette County and the town of Oxford, Mississippi.

Faulkner renamed Oxford as Jefferson within his fiction and used the county as the home of many recurring families, communities, conflicts, and historical memories. He sometimes called it his “apocryphal county.” The setting allowed him to explore the American South across generations, including issues of race, class, violence, inheritance, and the legacy of the Civil War.

The county first became prominent in Sartoris, published in 1929, and appears in most of Faulkner’s novels and more than 50 short stories. Readers may confuse it with Oxford or Lafayette County, but those are the real-world places that helped inspire Faulkner’s imaginary geography. Jefferson is the fictional county seat, while Oxford is its real-world counterpart.