Where to Start with William Faulkner: A Reading Guide

William Faulkner (1897–1962) is the most technically innovative of the great American novelists — the writer who, alongside Joyce, pushed the modernist novel to its furthest formal limits and produced, in his best work, some of the most profound accounts of history, family, and race in American literature. His Yoknapatawpha novels — set in his invented county in Mississippi — constitute one of the most fully realised fictional worlds in any literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.

Where to Start

The Best Entry Point: As I Lay Dying (1930)

The best first Faulkner — formally experimental but in a way that quickly becomes legible, and underpinned by a dark comedy that makes the experimentation purposeful rather than arbitrary. The Bundren family’s journey to bury Addie — through flood, fire, and days of summer heat with a decomposing body on a wagon — is simultaneously tragic and grotesque. Each of the fifteen narrators has a distinctive voice and angle of vision; the family’s motivations (Cash’s obsessional carpentry, Darl’s uncanny perception, Jewel’s violent devotion, Anse’s self-serving piety) create a portrait of an entire community’s psychology. Short (under 300 pages) and among Faulkner’s most urgent narratives.

The Masterpiece: The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Faulkner’s most celebrated novel and his most structurally demanding. The Compson family’s disintegration — the loss of their land, their sister Caddy’s disgrace, Quentin’s suicide, Benjy’s institutionalisation — is told in reverse chronological fragments through four radically different perspectives. The Benjy section, which opens the novel, presents a consciousness that cannot distinguish past from present or absent from present; readers who persist past this opening (which is intentionally disorienting) find the novel’s emotional weight increasing with each subsequent section. Best approached after As I Lay Dying, when Faulkner’s method is already familiar.

Light in August (1932)

The best second or third Faulkner for most readers — combining Faulkner’s formal experimentation with a more accessible narrative structure. The converging stories of Joe Christmas (a man of uncertain racial identity, living in the violence of the American South’s racial paranoia), Lena Grove (pregnant, walking across Alabama to find the father of her child), and the Reverend Gail Hightower (living in fantasies of Confederate glory) constitute Faulkner’s most sustained account of how race, religion, and gender shape individual lives and destroy them. The most approachable of his major novels after As I Lay Dying.

The Greatest: Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Faulkner’s most ambitious novel and, for many readers, his greatest — but requiring the most preparation. The story of Thomas Sutpen’s rise and fall in antebellum Mississippi is reconstructed by multiple narrators who can never be certain of the facts; the novel’s very structure (competing, contradictory accounts of the same events) enacts its theme: that the South’s history is inseparable from the myths the South tells about itself. The Quentin sections — in which he and his Harvard roommate Shreve piece together Sutpen’s story in a cold Cambridge dormitory room — are Faulkner’s most psychologically complex writing. Approach it after both As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.

Reading Faulkner

Faulkner’s sentences are famously long — sometimes running for pages, looping back on themselves, subordinating clause within clause within clause. The difficulty is real but specific: his syntax is not obscure, but it demands that the reader hold a great deal in mind at once, and it often defers its grammatical resolution to the sentence’s end. The best approach is to read slowly, not to panic when a sentence becomes tangled, and to trust that the emotional logic will emerge from the texture of the prose even when the syntactic logic is unclear. Many readers find that Faulkner becomes easier and more rewarding with each successive novel.