Sound and the Fury
The classic Southern Gothic tale that recounts the demise of a once-prominent Mississippi family, from the Nobel Prize– and Pulitzer Prize–winning author and “the greatest artist the South has produced” (Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man).
In the early twentieth century, when scandal erupts in the Compson family of Jefferson, Misssissippi, it is the eldest daughter, beautiful and rebellious Caddy, at the center of it all. But it’s the rest of the family who must deal with the fallout. There are Caddy’s three brothers: manchild Benjy, neurotic and conservative Quentin, and ruthless and cynical Jason. Meanwhile, Dilsey, the family’s Black servant, keeps house. Together, these four bear witness as the Compson family ties begin to unravel . . .
Originally published in 1929,
The Sound and the Fury is William Faulkner’s fourth novel. Although it was not an immediate success, it has since gone on to be considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, as well as Faulkner’s masterpiece.
William Faulkner
William Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. 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 Southern literature, and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature made him the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), 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 one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Also on the list were Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).
