The collector, Richard Frary, was an alumnus of The Johns Hopkins University and president of a real estate firm in New York City. He was an avid book collector with a particular interest in 19th- and 20th-century American literature.

William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897, the eldest of four sons to parents Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner (which he later spelled "Faulkner"). Faulkner's family moved to Oxford, Mississippi when he was a young child. Oxford is where Faulkner spent the majority of his life and served as a primary influence in his writing. In 1918, he joined the British Royal Air Force during World War I and trained as a cadet in Canada, though the war ended before his training was complete. Faulkner returned to Oxford and attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out in 1920. Faulkner married Estelle Oldham in 1929, who already had two children, Victoria and Malcolm, from her previous marriage to Cornell Franklin. Estelle and Faulkner had a daughter named Jill in 1933. Faulkner authored several novels and short stories during his career, including The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). He worked periodically as a screenwriter in Hollywood for such companies as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Brothers, and Twentieth Century-Fox. Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, a National Book Award in 1951, and two Pulitzer Prize awards: one for the novel A Fable in 1955 and another posthumously for the novel The Reivers in 1963. Faulkner died on July 6, 1962.

Source: “William Faulkner.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. Accessed April 4, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Faulkner.