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.

In 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 trail-blazing 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of William Faulkner's finest novels, As I Lay Dying was originally published in 1930, and remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, it vividly brings to life Faulkner's imaginary South, one of the great invented landscapes in all of literature, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark.

This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.

Here, published in a single volume as Faulkner always hoped they would be, are the three novels that comprise the famous Snopes trilogy, a saga that stands as perhaps the greatest feat of Faulkner's imagination. "The Hamlet, "the first book of the series chronicling the advent and rise of the grasping Snopes family in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, is a work that Cleanth Brooks called "one of the richest novels in the Faulkner canon." It recounts how the wily, cunning Flem Snopes dominates the rural community of Frenchman's Bend--and claims the voluptuous Eula Varner as his bride. "The Town, " the second novel, records Flem's ruthless struggle to take over the county seat of Jefferson, Mississippi. Finally, "The Mansion "tells of Mink Snopes, whose archaic sense of honor brings about the downfall of his cousin Flem. "For all his concerns with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man," noted Ralph Ellison. "Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

In New Orleans in 1937, a man and woman embark on a headlong flight in to the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temp tations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner compo ses a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifi ce, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injurie s of the spirit.