The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury

About the Book

A collectible hardcover edition of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner’s masterpiece, and perhaps the greatest novel about the decline of the Southern aristocracy, with a new introduction by Ayana Mathis, the New York Times bestselling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

A Penguin Vitae Edition


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.
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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 FuryAs I Lay DyingLight 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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About the Author

Ayana Mathis
AYANA MATHIS’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was a New York Times best seller, an NPR Best Book of 2013, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. and has been translated into sixteen languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, Guernica, and RollingStone. Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Philadelphia, and currently lives in New York City where she teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA Program. More by Ayana Mathis
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