This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1985 corrected text and is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. "Backgrounds and Contexts" is divided into three sections, each of which includes a concise introduction by Michael Gorra that carefully frames the issues presented, with particular attention to As I Lay Dying's place in Faulkner's literary life. "Contemporary Reception" reprints American, English, and French reviews by Clifton Fadiman, Henry Nash Smith, Edwin Muir, and Maurice Coindreau, among others, along with Valery Larbaud's never-before-translated preface to the first French edition of the novel. "The Writer and His Work" examines Faulkner's claim to have written the novel in six weeks without changing a word. It includes his comments on the book's composition along with his later thoughts on and changing opinions of it, sample pages from the manuscript, his Nobel Prize address, and the little-known short story in which he first used the title. "Cultural Context" reprints an essay by Carson McCullers and an excerpt from James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men along with other materials that address questions of Southern Agrarianism and the Southern grotesque. "Criticism" begins with the editor's introduction to As I Lay Dying's critical history and scholarly reception. Eleven major essays are provided by Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Calvin Bedient, Andre Bleikasten, Eric Sundquist, Stephen M. Ross, Doreen Fowler, Patrick O'Donnell, Richard Gray, John Limon, and Donald M. Kartiganer. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included.

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES Spine-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.

This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1985 corrected text and is accompanied by newly updated and expanded explanatory annotations and an introduction by Michael Gorra. "Backgrounds and Contexts" is divided into three sections, each of which includes a concise introduction by Michael Gorra that carefully frames the issues presented, with particular attention to As I Lay Dying's place in Faulkner's literary life. "Contemporary Reception" includes a selection of seven reviews, including those by Julia K. W. Baker, Henry Nash Smith, and Valery Larbaud. "The Writer and His Work" examines Faulkner's own claims regarding the composition of the novel and his changing opinions over time, sample pages from the manuscript, his Nobel Prize address, and additional writings by Faulkner on Yoknapatawpha County. "Cultural Context" reprints seven essays and advertisements-three selections new to the Second Edition-along with other materials that address questions of Southern motherhood, Agrarianism, and the Southern grotesque. "Criticism" begins with the editor's introduction to As I Lay Dying's critical history and scholarly reception. Eleven critical essays are included-five new to the Second Edition-by Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Eric Sundquist, Doreen Fowler, Dorothy J. Hale, Patrick O'Donnell, John T. Matthews, John Limon, Richard Godden, Susan Scott Parrish, and Erin E. Edwards. A chronology and a selected bibliography are also included.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The authoritative text of Absalom, Absalom!, established by Noel Polk in 1986 and accompanied by Susan Scott Parrish's introduction and explanatory footnotes. Two maps and five other images. A rich selection of background and contextual materials carefully arranged to draw readers into the American South of William Faulkner's imagination. Topics include "Contemporary Reception," "The Writer and His Work," and "Historical Contexts." Seventeen critical essays on the novel's major themes, from classic literary critiques to recent scholarship on, among other topics, race, gender, and the environment. A chronology and a selected bibliography.

Originally published in 1949, William Faulkner's Knight's Gambit is a collection of six stories written in the 1930s and 1940s that focus on the criminal investigations of Yoknapatawpha's long-time county attorney, Gavin Stevens?a man more interested in justice than the law. All previous and current editions of Knight's Gambit have been based on the first edition, which is fraught with a number of problems. Since tear sheets of the five previously published stories were used in setting the first edition, the original Knight's Gambit is a hodgepodge of various magazines? house styles with no consistency in punctuation and spelling conventions from story to story. Far greater issues arise, however, from the substantive (and sometimes substantial) changes magazine editors made to Faulkner's prose. These changes were made variously for concision, propriety, or magazine design. Sometimes northern editors removed the southernness of Faulkner's stories, either out of ignorance of the South or in order to appeal to a mass audience. Using four previously unknown Faulkner typescripts, along with other manuscript and typescript evidence, John N. Duvall presents an edition of Knight's Gambit that restores over four thousand words that editors cut from the stories. Also included is an introduction by Duvall discussing the role of detective fiction and popular magazines in creating a different kind of postwar readership for Faulkner that paves the way for the eventual republication of Faulkner's modernist masterpieces. The new edition enables readers to reevaluate the stories of Knight's Gambit and their place in Faulkner's career as a short story writer.

Faulkner examines the changing relationship of black to white and of man to the land, and weaves a complex work that is rich in understanding of the human condition.

A fascinating glimpse of the author as a young artist, Faulkner's sophomore novel, Mosquitoes (1927), introduces us to a colorful band of passengers on a boating excursion from New Orleans. This engaging, high-spirited tale-which Faulkner wrote "for the sake of writing because it was fun"-provides a delightful accompaniment to his canonical works.

The story of the dissolution of the once aristocratic Compson family, told through the minds of three of its members, including the imbecilci Benjy - 'the tale told by an idiot'. In very different ways they prove inadequate to their own family history, unable to deal with either the responsibility of the past or the imperatives of the present . The structure of the book - three monologues followed by an objective account of the family history - operates in the same way as a classical symphony, as each 'movement' reacts against, enlarges and qualifies the others. The title implies a tale 'signifying nothing', but this is a ruse - Faulkner's vision is tragic in the full sense of the word. His honesty and his craft separate us from the fate of his characters - by teaching us to understand them he gives us a chance to prevail.

William Faulkner's provocative and enigmatic 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, is widely acknowledged as one of the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century. This revised and expanded Norton Critical Edition builds on the strengths of its predecessors while focusing new attention on both the novel's contemporary reception and its rich cultural and historical contexts. The text for the Third Edition is again that of the corrected text scrupulously prepared by Noel Polk, whose textual note precedes the novel. David Minter's annotations, designed to assist readers with obscure words and allusions, have been retained. "Contemporary Reception," new to the Third Edition, considers the broad range of reactions to Faulkner's extraordinary novel on publication. Michael Gorra's headnote sets the stage for assessments by Evelyn Scott, Henry Nash Smith, Clifton P. Fadiman, Dudley Fitts, Richard Hughes, and Edward Crickmay. New materials by Faulkner ("The Writer and His Work") include letters to Malcolm Cowley about The Portable Faulkner and Faulkner's Nobel Prize for Literature address. "Cultural and Historical Contexts" begins with Michael Gorra's insightful headnote, which is followed by seven seminal considerations-five of them new to the Third Edition-of southern history, literature, and memory. Together, these works-by C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Richard Gray, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, William James, and Henri Bergson-provide readers with important contexts for understanding the novel. "Criticism" represents eighty-five years of scholarly engagement with The Sound and the Fury. New to the Third Edition are essays by Eric Sundquist, Noel Polk, Doreen Fowler, Richard Godden, Stacy Burton, and Maria Truchan-Tataryn. A Chronology of Faulkner's life and work is newly included along with an updated Selected Bibliography.

Successive episodes in the death and burial of Addie Bundren are recounted by various members of the family circle, principally as they are carting their mother's coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, in order to bury her among her people. As the desires and fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular speech of the South, the author builds up an impression as epic as the old Testament, as earthly and comic as Chaucer, as American as HUCKLEBERRY FINN.

This title includes seven 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.

"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 Award
Forty-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 they dwarf the protagonists of most novels.

At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member--including Addie--and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life.

Qentin Compson and Shreve, his Harvard room-mate, are obsessed by the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. As a poor white boy, Sutpen was turned away from a plantation owner's mansion by a Negro butler. From then on, Sutpen determined to be a Virginia plantation owner himself. His ambitions are soon realized:plantation, marriage, children, his own troop to fight in the Civil War...but Sutpen returns to find his estate in ruins. Worse, Charles, son of Sutpen's first repudiated to a partly coloured girl, seeks engagement to Sutpen's daughter, Judith.When Charles realizes this he offers to give up Judith for recognition by Sutpen.

The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Modern Library's new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner--also available are "Snopes, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, "and "Absalom, Absalom "
William Faulkner was a master of the short story. Most of the pieces in this collection are drawn from the greatest period in his writing life, the fifteen or so years beginning in 1929, when he published "The Sound and the Fury." They explore many of the themes found in the novels and feature characters of small-town Mississippi life that are uniquely Faulkner's. In "A Rose for Emily," the first of his stories to appear in a national magazine, a straightforward, neighborly narrator relates a tale of love, betrayal, and murder. The vicious family of the Snopes trilogy turns up in "Barn Burning," about a son's response to the activities of his arsonist father. And Jason and Caddy Compson, two other inhabitants of Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, are witnesses to the terrorizing of a pregnant black laundress in "That Evening Sun." These and the other stories gathered here attest to the fact that Faulkner is, as Ralph Ellison so aptly noted, "the greatest artist the South has produced."