William Faulkner 125: The Sound and the Fury
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To commemorate William Faulkner's 125th birthday on September 25, 1897 and the 60th anniversary of his death this year, we will read the Sound and the Fury.
William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːknər/; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, essays, and a play. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.
Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919 and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner's renown reached its peak upon the publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), each won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) appears on similar lists.
The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. It employs several narrative styles, including stream of consciousness. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story, which Faulkner later said was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
William Faulkner 125: The Sound and the Fury