Martin J Dain

Martin J. Dain (c. 1924) is an American photographer whose evocative black‑and‑white images offer an intimate portrait of William Faulkner’s world and the Mississippi landscape that inspired his fiction. Born in Boston and based today in Carmel Valley, California, Dain was a thirty‑seven‑year‑old professional living in New York City when his lifelong admiration for Faulkner led him to Oxford in 1961. Over two seasons (1961–63), he documented Faulkner at home, the Oxford courthouse square, and the surrounding rural communities of Lafayette County—work that cemented his reputation as one of the few photographers granted access to the Nobel Prize–winning author’s private life.

Dain’s photographs first appeared in his self‑published volume Faulkner’s County: Yoknapatawpha (1964) and were later collected and reissued as Faulkner’s World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain by the University of Mississippi Press in 1997. A traveling exhibition of those prints—curated by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture—has toured libraries and museums across the South, preserving a visual record of Faulkner’s final years and the people and places that populated his fiction. His work remains a touchstone for both literature lovers and documentary photographers seeking to capture the spirit of a place through its everyday moments.