Staff Pick
Faulkner is in a class of his own, and this is his best work. Moving seamlessly from its opening incoherence to its revelatory finale, it's almost as if he is teaching you how to read the novel as you are reading it! A family drama with some of the most exquisitely drawn characters in all of fiction, Faulkner takes up those disparate threads of beauty and loss, entwining them over the course of the story until you realize that you can't have one without the other. Don't let the eccentric prose of that first chapter deter you; you don't want to miss what's hidden in these pages.
Recommended by Nathan, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The Sound and the Fury is made up of undifferentiated streams of consciousness that ultimately turn out to be the inner voices of a family's siblings. Its construction is so masterful that the last sentence refers the reader back to the first one, as any perfect work of art might do.
Sound has the earmarks of a modern psychological study, although the book was published in 1929. It is a dramatic and harrowing tale of the Compson family's pathology — primarily in the form of incest and incestuous thoughts.
Review:
"For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics." Ralph Ellison
Review:
"Faulkner...belongs to the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." Edmund Wilson
Review:
"For all the range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country." Robert Penn Warren
Review:
"Faulkner performed a labor of imagination that has not been equaled in our time...first, to invent a Mississippi county that was like a mythical kingdom, but was complete and living in all its details; second, to make his story of Yoknapatawpha County stand as a parable of legend of all the Deep South." Malcolm Cowley
Synopsis:
One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century,
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.
This edition follows the text of The Sound and the Fury as corrected in 1984. It includes an editor's note by Noel Polk on the corrections following the text.
Synopsis:
First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.
About the Author
William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He published his first book,
The Marble Faun, a collection of poems, in 1924, but it is as a literary chronicler of life in the Deep South — particularly in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the setting for several of his novels — that he is most highly regarded. In such novels as
Sanctuary (1931),
The Hamlet (1940),
The Town (1957), and
The Mansion (1959), he explored the full range of post-Civil War Southern life, focusing both on the personal histories of his characters (especially members of the Snopes family) and on the moral uncertainties of an increasingly dissolute society. His other novels include
The Sound and the Fury (1929),
As I Lay Dying (1930),
Light in August (1932),
Absalom, Absalom! (1936),
The Unvanquished (1938),
Intruder in the Dust (1948),
Requiem for a Nun (1951),
A Fable (1954), and
The Reivers (1962). For the latter two books, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote several volumes of short stories as well as a collection of poems and essays.
William Faulkner died in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 6, 1962.
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