Monica Almeida/The New York Times

David Milch, a television producer who knows a thing or two about sound and fury, has concluded a new production deal with HBO that will allow him to produce television shows and movies from the literary works of William Faulkner, the cable channel announced on Wednesday.

“I’m not, probably, the first person they would have thought of approaching them,” Mr. Milch said in a phone interview, referring to his months-long discussions with the William Faulkner Literary Estate. “But a number of conversations were fruitful and here we are.”

Associated Press

In his television career, Mr. Milch is best known for creating Emmy Award-winning series like “NYPD Blue” (with Steven Bochco) and “Deadwood,” the vulgar and violent (and never properly concluded) western that ran on HBO.

But before he started putting colorful words in the mouths of Andy Sipowicz and Al Swearengen, Mr. Milch made his literary bones as an undergraduate at Yale University and a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa; he worked with Robert Penn Warren (who shared a biographer, Joseph Blotner, with Faulkner), Cleanth Brooks and R. W. B. Lewis on a history of American literature, and contributed fiction and criticism to publications like The Southern Review and The Atlantic Monthly.

More recently, Mr. Milch said, his daughter Olivia had been studying Faulkner’s novel “Light in August” at Yale and “renewed my engagement with the material,” eventually leading to discussions between his company, Red Board Productions, and the William Faulkner Literary Estate.

Under the terms of their agreement, Mr. Milch and the estate’s executor, Lee Caplin, will work together to choose from 19 novels and 125 short stories by Faulkner that could be adapted for film or television. (Olivia Milch will be a coordinating producer on the adaptations.) HBO said in a news release that it would have the first opportunity to finance and produce these projects.

“My hope is to steer the project, as much as to be its source,” Mr. Milch said, adding that “conversations were ongoing” with other writers and artists who would handle the adaptations of specific Faulkner works.

Mr. Milch’s new exclusive deal with HBO will also cover his new drama series “Luck,” which stars Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte.

Just don’t hold out much hope that this pact will lead to a long-awaited ending to “Deadwood,” which broadcast its last episode in 2006.

“Every man’s entitled to hope,” Mr. Milch said with a laugh. “It looked like we were getting close, about six months ago. It’s a complicated transaction, so we’re moving forward in other areas.”