William Faulkner

Too short for the U.S. Army, he talked his way into Canadian RAF flight training in 1918; the war ended before he saw combat, but he came home in a self-tailored officer's uniform, limping from a wound he never had. The postmaster job he held next, he lost for reading magazines on the clock and dumping the mail.

Hollywood paid what Mississippi couldn't: for two decades he wrote screenplays for Howard Hawks, including To Have and Have Not, drinking hard between contracts and returning home to write the Yoknapatawpha novels almost no one bought. The 1949 Nobel Prize, awarded nearly as an act of rescue, gave him the stage for his acceptance speech's famous refusal 'to accept the end of man.'

He died in 1962 of a heart attack, not long after a fall from a horse, his liver worn thin by decades of bourbon.