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Soldiers' Pay

Soldiers' Pay

About the Book

William Faulkner's first novel is one of the most compelling works of American fiction to emerge from the First World War.

A wounded veteran's homecoming is at the center of Faulkner's first novel. Badly scarred in body and mind, and unable to remember much, Donald Mahon is brought home at the end of the World War I by a fellow soldier and a young war widow they befriend on the train. Mahon's arrival is a shock to his hometown, however, for he had long since been reported dead. His flighty young fiancee is caught between her revulsion at his condition and her sense of duty, while Mahon's father greets his unexpected survival first with joy and then with a determined denial of what his grievous injuries mean. As events unfold, alliances are formed and broken, sacrifices are made, and Faulkner deftly invests his heartbreaking tale with some of the deeper themes that would come to mark his later masterpieces.
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Praise for Soldiers' Pay

"This book rings true." —The New York Times

"Comic, passionate, tormenting, and strange." —Literary Digest

"Moving and intense. The story alone is a gem, but for deeper things that lie back of the mere plot the book is likely to become a classic." —St. Louis Globe-Democrat
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Vintage International Series

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Voices of the Fallen Heroes
Of Human Bondage
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If Beale Street Could Talk (Deluxe Edition)
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The Rainbow
Caligula and Three Other Plays
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About the Author

William Faulkner
William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He published his first book, The Marble Faun, in 1924, but it is as a literary chronicler of life in the Deep South—particularly in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the setting for several of his novels—that he is most highly regarded. In such novels as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! he explored the full range of post–Civil War Southern life, focusing both on the personal histories of his characters and on the moral uncertainties of an increasingly dissolute society. In combining the use of symbolism with a stream-of-consciousness technique, he created a new approach to fiction writing. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. William Faulkner died in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 6, 1962. More by William Faulkner
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