Yoknapatawpha

"Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county created by the American author William Faulkner as a setting for many of his novels. Faulkner's fictional county is based upon and inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi and its county seat of Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner would often refer to Yoknapatawpha County as "my apocryphal county." Faulkner added a map of Yoknapatawpha County at the end of Absalom, Absalom!"
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Sherwood Anderson advised Faulkner to write about his "little postage stamp of native soil": the home territory and the people he knew best. Eventually, this is exactly what Faulkner did. Drawing of his family's history and tales he had heard on back porches on hunting trips during his youth, he created a mythical county called Yoknapatawpha. He invented its history and geography, elaborated upon them in astonishing detail in stories and novels written over thirty-five years. This immense cycle of interlocking stories spans nearly 150 years in the region's history, from the early nineteenth century, when the land was inhabited by Chickasaw Indians, to the middle of the twentieth century, as the county became modernized.
Bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River and on the south by the Yoknapatawpha River, Faulkner's "mythical kingdom" covers an area of approximately twenty-four hundred square miles, with a population of just over fifteen thousand. In the map of the county published in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), he wryly identified himself as "sole owner and proprietor". The Yoknapatawpha saga has been seen as a parable of the moral history of not just one northwest Mississippi county but of the South as a whole.
em Great American Writers: Twentieth Century de R. Baird Shuman.