Books by William Faulkner

Book SynopsisSpolit, feckless Temple Drake, the daughter of a judge, runs away from school with an unsuitable man. Abandoned by him with a gang of moonshiners, Temple falls into the clutches of the psychotic Popeye, one of the most grotesque characters of Faulkner''s imagination. A compelling, shocking tale of perverted justice in the Deep South, Sanctuary is also a moving plea for courage in the darkest of circumstances.Trade ReviewA haunting study of evil triumphant * New York Times *Not a book for the fainthearted * Sunday Times *Thick with menace, desire, compulsion and despair * Los Angeles Times *

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Book SynopsisBorn in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank. Rejected by the US military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925. His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notably The Blue LaTrade ReviewThere is no writer living who can play upon a scene the rich and Rembrandtesque flame that Faulkner commands * Evening Standard *His prose style is all his own, often sensuously alert, evocative, graceful * Daily Telegraph *Lays to rest any doubts that Faulkner could write a powerful love story * Washington Post *There is an extraordinary vigor and power in his writing, a feverish urge toward description in which words combine in a dense web of meaning * Chicago Tribune *

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Book SynopsisBorn in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank. Rejected by the US military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home, he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925. His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notably ThTrade ReviewOne of the most important works of American literature this century -- ObserverFaulkner has inexhaustible invention, powerful imagination, and he writes like an angel -- Arnold BennettFor range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterisation, humour and tragic intensity [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country -- Robert Penn WarrenIts unlike anything else in literature... The experience of reading it seemed closer to the experience of life than anything provided by a neatly contrived story line... After the war I read all I could of William Faulkner, and he continued to present some unique and, it seemed to me, valid way of looking at life -- Nicholas Mosley * Guardian *Not only was the book a kind of beginning for me, but that it endured still, it moved me deeply and remains "the damndest book I ever read" -- Niall Williams * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisThis Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1985 corrected text and is accompanied by detailed...Trade ReviewA masterpiece of dark humour * Daily Express *The greatest American writers of the last century were William Faulkner and Saul Bellow...As I Lay Dying and The Adventures of Augie March: it's hard to think of two better novels written in this country in any century -- Philip Roth * Observer *One of America's greatest writers * The Times *A beautiful novel * Independent *By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing (Ernest) Hemingway and (Scott) Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James . . . As I Lay Dying may be the most original novel ever written by an American -- Harold Bloom

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Book SynopsisVINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIESSpine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics.A landmark in American fiction, Light in August explores Faulkner's central theme: the nature of evil. Joe Christmas - a man doomed, deracinated and alone - wanders the Deep South in search of an identity, and a place in society. After killing his perverted God-fearing lover, it becomes inevitable that he is pursued by a lynch-hungry mob. Yet after the sacrifice, there is new life, a determined ray of light in Faulkner's complex and tragic world.

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Book SynopsisBorn in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank.Rejected by the US military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home, he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925.His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notablyTrade ReviewA work of timeless importance * New York Times *He has written a novel which in form is a thriller - and a very good thriller too - but this without distracting from its profundity * New Statesman *There is an extraordinary vigor and power in his writing, a feverish urge toward description in which words combine in a dense web of meaning * Chicago Tribune *The greatest American writers of the last century were William Faulkner and Saul Bellow -- Philip RothIn a single brief decade, Faulkner had produced more lasting works of fiction than many great writers do in a lifetime * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisSeven dramatic stories which reveal Faulkner''s compassionate understanding of the Deep South. His characters are humble people who live out their lives within the same small circle of the earth, who die unrecorded. Their epitaphs make a fitting introduction to one of the great American writers of the century.

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Book SynopsisThis is a collection of the very best of William Faulkner's short stories. Included are classics of short-form fiction such as A Bear Hunt', A Rose for Emily', Two Soldiers' and The Brooch'. Faulkner's ability to compress his epic vision into narratives of such grace and tragic intensity defines him as one of the finest and most original writers America has ever produced.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"The Norton Critical Edition of Light in August appears at a key juncture, and Melanie Benson Taylor’s editorship points this up keenly. The novel and the scholarship included here attest to the centrality of race in Yoknapatawpha, a fact well-known in the Faulkner community, yet wider understanding of which this volume will ensure. Benson Taylor has done more than skillfully edit a compendium. She has made a volume that is essential to ongoing efforts to teach and write about the increasingly race-conscious writer Faulkner became following The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying in the mid-1930s and beyond." -- Peter Lurie, University of Richmond

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Book SynopsisEver since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, the novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart, this is a novel about lovelessness

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Book SynopsisFaulkner''s final novel is a tale of three Mississippi travellers. Ned, Boon and young Lucius travel to Memphis in a stolen car to find love and fortune. Once there, Ned trades in the car for a racehorse, Lucius comes of age, and Boon sets about trying to win the heart of a prostitute named ''Miss Corrie''.Trade ReviewOne of his greatest novels * Independent *This is in some ways an implacably sunny book, but any temptations Faulkner may have felt toward nostalgia are tempered by the clear eye through which he always viewed the world...written in prose at once distinctly Faulknerian yet entirely accessible....a lovely book, funny and touching and Faulkner to the core * Washington Post *

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Book SynopsisThis postbellum Greek tragedy is the perfect introduction to Faulkner's elaborate descriptive syntax. Quentin Compson and Shreve, his Harvard roommate, are obsessed with the tragic rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. As a poor white boy, Sutpen was turned away from a plantation owner's mansion by a black butler. From then on, he was determined to force his way into the upper echelons of Southern society. His relentless will ensures his ambitions are soon realised; land, marriage, children, his own troop to fight in the Civil War... but Sutpen returns from the conflict to find his estate in ruins and his family collapsing. Secrets from his own past threaten to ruin the lives of his children and destroy everything he has worked for.Trade ReviewThe novel in which Faulkner most profoundly and completely says what he has to say about the South and the human condition -- Walter AllenFor range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterisation, humour and tragic intensity [Faulkner's Works] are without equal in our time and country -- Robert Penn WarrenFor 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 which made for the greatness of our classics -- Ralph EllisonThe magnitude of Faulkner's characters lies in their blood and bone and sinew: the exquisite specificity of their human fallibility... Faulkner seemed incapable of separating intimate character from universal truth, and this rough refusal - both humble and defiant - was at the root of his force as a writer... No other American writer has achieved such staggering heights of form * Boston Globe *Heart-pinching * New York Times *

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Book SynopsisJoe Christmas - a man doomed, deracinated and alone - wanders the Deep South in search of an...Trade ReviewBurns throughout with a fierce indignation against cruelty, stupidity and prejudice - a great book * Spectator *Faulkner has inexhaustible invention, powerful imagination, and he writes, generally, like an angel -- Arnold BennettBy universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century, clearly surpassing (Ernest) Hemingway and (Scott) Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry James -- Harold BloomMagisterial * Independent *

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Book SynopsisBorn in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank.Rejected by the US military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home, he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925.His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notably

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Book SynopsisA classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black who has long refused to adopt the black's traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused of murdering a white man.

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Book SynopsisThe complete text of Faulkner’s third novel, published for the first time in 1973, appeared with his reluctant consent in a much cut version in 1929 as Sartoris.

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Book SynopsisThis is the second volume of Faulkner’s trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South. Like its predecessor, The Hamlet, and its successor, The Mansion, The Town is completely self-contained, but it gains resonance from being read with the other two. The story of Flem Snopes’s ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the book is rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humor and profundity.

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Book Synopsis'The Bear, ' 'The Old People, ' 'A Bear Hunt, ' 'Race at Morning'--some of Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner's most famous stories are collected in this volume--in which he observed, celebrated, and mourned the fragile otherness that is nature, as well as the cruelty and humanity of men. 'Contains some of Faulkner's best work.'

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Book SynopsisA true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” —William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.

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Book SynopsisIn this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit. The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.

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Book SynopsisOne of Faulkner’s comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family’s retainers, to steal his grandfather’s car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priests’ black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey, for which they are all ill-equipped, that ends at Miss Reba’s bordello in Memphis. From there a series of wild misadventures ensues—involving horse smuggling, trainmen, sheriffs’ deputies, and jail.

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Book SynopsisThis novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955. An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner. Recently it has come to be recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre. His descriptions of the war rise to magnificence, according to The New York Times, and include, in Malcolm Cowley's words, some of the most powerful scenes he ever conceived.

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Book Synopsis“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing that, only then does he take up novel writing.” —William Faulkner Winner of the National Book AwardForty-two stories make up this magisterial collection by the writer who stands at the pinnacle of modern American fiction. Compressing an epic expanse of vision into hard and wounding narratives, Faulkner’s stories evoke the intimate textures of place, the deep strata of history and legend, and all the fear, brutality, and tenderness of the human condition. These tales are set not only in Yoknapatawpha County, but in Beverly Hills and in France during World War I. They are populated by such characters as the Faulknerian archetypes Flem Snopes and Quentin Compson, as well as by ordinary men and women who emerge so sharply and indelibly in these pages that the

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Book SynopsisThe four novels in this Library of America collection show Faulkner at the height of his powers and fully demonstrate the range of his genius. They explore the tragic and comic aspects of a South haunted by its past and uncertain of its future.In the intricate, spellbinding masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Quentin Compson descends into a vortex of images, voices, passions, and doomed desires as he and his Harvard roommate re-create the story of Thomas Sutpen and the insane ambitions, romantic hopes, and distortions of honor and conscience that trap Sutpen and those around him, until their grief and pride and fate become the inescapable and unbearable legacy of a past that is not dead and not even past.In seven episodes, The Unvanquished (1938) recounts the ordeals and triumphs of the Sartoris family during and after the Civil War as seen through the maturing consciousness of young Bayard Sartoris. The indomitable Granny Millard, th

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Book SynopsisIn 1925 William Faulkner began his professional writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He had published a volume of poetry (The Marble Faun), had written a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson.In his first six months in New Orleans, where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the Times-Picayune and in the Double Dealer.The pieces in New Orleans Sketches broadcast seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and style that would characterize Faulkner's mature fiction. As his sketches take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his early literary sophistication.In praise of New Orleans Sketches, Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times Book Review that ""the interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work.""In his trailblazing introduction, Carvel Collins often called ""Faulkner's best-informed critic,"" illuminates the period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making the transition from poet to novelist.""For the reader of Faulkner,"" Paul Engle wrote in the Chicago Tribune, ""the book is indispensable. Its brilliant introduction . . . is full both of helpful information . . . and of fine insights."" ""We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting his power against a partially indifferent environment,"" states the Book Exchange (London). ""The long introduction . . . must rank as a major literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps the greatest of our times.""

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Book SynopsisA powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction. Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake, who introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.

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Book SynopsisThe Library of America edition of the complete novels of William Faulkner culminates with this volume presenting his first four full-length works of fiction, each newly edited, and, in many cases, restored with passages that were altered or (in the case of Mosquitoes) expurgated by the original publishers. This is Faulkner as he was meant to be read.In these four novels we can track Faulkner’s extraordinary evolution as, over the course of a few years, he discovers and masters the mode and matter of his greatest works. Soldiers’ Pay (1926) expresses the disillusionment provoked by World War I through its account of the postwar experiences of homecoming soldiers, including a severely wounded R.A.F. pilot, in a style of restless experimentation. In Mosquitoes (1927), a raucous satire of artistic poseurs, many of them modeled after acquaintances of Faulkner in New Orleans, he continues to try out a range of stylistic approaches as he chronicles an ill-fated cruise on Lake Pontchartrain.With the sprawling Flags in the Dust (published in truncated form in 1929 as Sartoris), Faulkner began his exploration of the mythical region of Mississippi that was to provide the setting for most of his subsequent fiction. Drawing on family history from the Civil War and after, and establishing many characters who recur in his later books, Flags in the Dust marks the crucial turning point in Faulkner’s evolution as a novelist.The volume concludes with Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (1929). This multilayered telling of the decline of the Compson clan over three generations, with its complex mix of narrative voices and its poignant sense of isolation and suffering within a family, is one of the most stunningly original American novels.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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