William Faulkner

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.