William Faulkner was born in Oxford, Mississippi in 1897. Living in the south gave Faulkner a firsthand account of the struggle between letting go of the past and trying to move forward. He also saw the difficulties people around him were facing: the problems making ends meet and living day to day in the turn-of-the-century south, and Faulkner brings this theme to life in the short story, "A Rose for Emily."  Emily Grierson is an elderly woman who desperately clings to the past while the world around her is moving into the future. Her life is a mystery to her townspeople; once she died, however, the entire town was in attendance at her funeral, only to see what happened to her. In telling this tale, Faulkner goes back and forth between the present of the story and flashbacks to efficiently divulge each and every detail. Faulkner elegantly uses a non-linear timeline to intensify the ever-present struggle between the ideologies of the old south and those of the new south. Miss Emily Grierson is a woman who embodies the old south. The customs, the etiquette, the unspoken rules, and that's the way she likes it. When the times begin to change, she retreats into her house, refusing to go along with the new styles of living. Yet, when Miss Emily looks out her window and she sees something that she might like about the new south, his name is Homer Barron. Homer is "a Yankee- a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face  (Faulkner 31). He immediately becomes a center of attention and entertainment in the town. He is the epitome of the new south. The relationship between Miss Emily and Homer Barron is a blending of old south and new south, the merging of two eras. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him.  Then we said, "She will persuade him yet,  because Homer himself had remarked- he liked men, and it was know that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Clu