American · b. 1897
Nobel Prize in Literature 1949; Pulitzer Prize 1955 and 1963
William Faulkner was an American novelist and Nobel laureate whose The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying stand as the most formally ambitious achievements in American modernist fiction.
William Faulkner spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, and set almost all of his major fiction in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County — a concentrated geography modelled on Lafayette County that he populated with interlocking families across generations. Working primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, he produced a body of work that is among the most formally experimental and emotionally demanding in American literature. His novels use stream of consciousness, multiple unreliable narrators, non-linear chronology, and extreme shifts of register and diction to render the southern experience — its beauty, its violence, its guilt, and its decay — with uncompromising complexity.
The Sound and the Fury (1929) tells the story of the decline of the Compson family through four sections, each narrated differently: the first through the fragmented consciousness of Benjy, who has an intellectual disability; the second through the increasingly deranged interior monologue of Quentin on the day of his suicide; the third through the bitter clarity of Jason; and the fourth through a more conventional third-person narrative centred on Dilsey, the family’s Black servant. No summary does justice to the experience of reading it. As I Lay Dying (1930), narrated in fifty-nine sections by fifteen different characters as the Bundren family transports Addie Bundren’s corpse across Mississippi, is Faulkner at his most formally inventive and — in its black comedy and its empathy for the poor white South — at his most human.
Faulkner is demanding in ways that are real rather than merely fashionable: his sentences can be dauntingly long, his chronologies deliberately obscured, and his use of dialect and unstated reference requires either prior knowledge of the period or patient annotation. But readers who invest the effort encounter a fictional world as fully realised as any in the American canon. Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and his short story collection Go Down, Moses are essential companion texts.
by William Faulkner
The decline of the Compson family in Mississippi is told four times — by Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and a third-person narrator — each section dissolving further the coherent narrative that preceded it. Faulkner's most formally radical novel is also his most emotionally devastating: a meditation on loss, time, and the American South's refusal to grieve honestly.
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by William Faulkner
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi in 1833 with a hundred slaves and a design: to build a dynasty. By the time Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate Shreve piece the story together in 1910, the design has produced only catastrophe. Faulkner's most ambitious novel, told through multiple narrators across multiple decades.
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by William Faulkner
Seven interconnected stories spanning a century of the McCaslin family, both its white and Black branches, culminating in 'The Bear'—one of the greatest long stories in American fiction—in which Ike McCaslin confronts the ledgers of his grandfather's crimes against enslaved people and repudiates his inheritance.
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Three interlocking stories in Jefferson, Mississippi: Joe Christmas, a man who may or may not be partly Black, whose ambiguous racial identity will destroy him; Lena Grove, a pregnant young woman walking toward her lover; and Reverend Hightower, disgraced and retired, watching from his window. Faulkner's most humanely accessible major novel.
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by William Faulkner
Told through fifteen narrators, As I Lay Dying follows the Bundren family's harrowing journey across Mississippi to bury their matriarch Addie in the town of Jefferson — a journey that is simultaneously a dark comedy of rural American poverty and one of modernism's most formally radical explorations of consciousness and death.
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Where to start with William Faulkner — whether to begin with As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, or Light in August. A complete reading guide.
guide
William Faulkner's complete bibliography in order — from The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying to Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August. Best starting points for new readers.
list
Faulkner's fracturing of the Compson family across four radically different narrative voices is the peak of American modernism. These books share its formal ambition, its psychological depth, and its willingness to make narrative difficulty the price of genuine intimacy.
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