The sound and the fury & As I lay dying

One of William Faulkner?s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren?s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, As I Lay Dying vividly brings to life Faulkner?s imaginary South, one of literature?s great invented landscapes, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark. The Sound and the Fury, a provocative and perplexing novel by William Faulkner published in 1929, is largely regarded as one of the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century. The Sound and the Fury traces the downfall of the aristocratic Compson family in their fictional home of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Here the landed gentry of the Reconstruction-era South still cling to their obsolete constructs of race, class, and sex for salvation from financial and personal ruin. In kaleidoscopic prose, Faulkner relates the Compson siblings? tales of their own demise: Benjy, the brother whose mental disability blends the past with the present; Quentin, who is consumed by his obsession with his family?s honor; Jason, whose blind rage inflicts itself upon the rest of the household; and the elusive sister, Caddy, whose tragic exile from the family sets in motion their fall from grace. The Sound and the Fury brings to life Faulkner?s South as a land of poverty and decadence, of gallantry and greed, that reveals the rich cultural and historical context in which it was written. What Faulkner once considered his ?most splendid failure? now sits among the cornerstones of American literature.