“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner   Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”

first Published In 1931, This Classic Psychological Melodrama Has Been Viewed As More Of A Social Document In His Tragic Legend Of The South Than Mere Story. From Popeye, A Moonshining Racketeer With No Conscience And Temple Drake, Beautiful, Bored And Vulnerable, To Harace Benbow, A Lawyer Of Honor And Decency Wishing For More In His Life, And Gowan Stevens, College Student With A Weakness For Drink, Faulkner Writes Of Changing Social Values And Order. A Sinister Cast Peppered With Social Outcasts And Perverts Perform Abduction, Murder, And Mayhem In This Harsh And Brutal Story Of Sensational And Motiveless Evil.students Of Faulkner Have Found An Allegorical Interpretation Of Sanctuary As A Comment On The Degradation Of Old South's Social Order By Progressive Modernism And Materialistic Exploitation. Popeye And His Co-horts Represent This Hurling Change That Is Corrupting The Historic Traditions Of The South, Symbolized By Horace Stevens, Which Are No Longer Able To Protect The Victimized Negro And Poor White Trash Due To Middle-class Apathy And Inbred Violence.ellisonfor All His Concern With The South, Faulkner Was Actually Seeking Out The Nature Of Man. Thus We Must Return To Him For That Continuity Of Moral Purpose Which Made For The Greatness Of Our Classics. --ralph Ellison

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is the story of a family of Southern aristocrats on the brink of personal and financial ruin.One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsThe Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.“I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” —from The Sound and the Fury

In prose of biblical grandeur and feverish intensity, William Faulkner reconstructed the history of the American South as a tragic legend of courage and cruelty, gallantry and greed, futile nobility, and obscene crimes. He set this legend in a small, minutely realized parallel universe he called Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William FaulknerLight in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.

Faulkner's great comic novel moves on the wheels of breathless suspense. Lucius Priest, Boon Hogganbeck, and Ned McCaslin "borrow" Lucius grandfather's automobile at the beginning of a hilarious journey that pales in comparison to what awaits the reivers (plunderers or freebooters) in Memphis. Ned trades the auto for a most dubious racehorse. How the reivers grapple with the crisis is the mainspring of the story which leads from a brothel to a brush with the law to the most bizarre horse racing in fact or fiction! The wild humor and the frenetic action will not, however, obscure to the listener that "The Reivers," like all of Faulkner's work, is about moving and tender human relationships and moral insights into human conduct.

These four novels from the 1930s show Faulkner at the height of his powers and fully demonstrate the range of his genius. They explore the tragic and comic aspects of a South haunted by its past and uncertain of its future. In the intricate, spellbinding masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! 1936, Quentin Compson descends into a vortex of images, voices, passions, and doomed desires as he and his Harvard roommate re-create the story of Thomas Sutpen and the insane ambitions, romantic hopes, and distortions of honor and conscience that trap Sutpen and those around him, until their grief and pride and fate become the inescapable and unbearable legacy of a past that is not dead and not even past. In seven episodes, The Unvanquished 1938 recounts the ordeals and triumphs of the Sartoris family during and after the Civil War as seen through the maturing consiousness of young Bayard Sartoris. The indomitable Granny Millard, the honor-driven patriarch Colonel Sartoris, the quick-witted and inventive Ringo, the ferociously heroic Drusilla, and the scheming, mendacious Ab Snopes embody the inheritance that Bayard must reconcile a with new, but diminished, South. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem published in 1939 as The Wild Palms tells of desperate lovers fleeing convention and of a convict escaping the chaos of passion. In "The Wild Palms," an emotional and geographic odyssey ends in a Mississippi coastal town. In counterpoint, "Old Man" recounts the adventures of an inarticulate "tall convict" swept to freedom by a raging Mississippi flood, but who then fights to return to his simple prison life. In The Hamlet 1940, the first book of the great Snopes family trilogy, the outrageous scheming energy of Flem Snopes and his relatives is vividly and hilariously juxtaposed with the fragil communal customs of Frenchman's Bend. Here are Ike Snopes, in love with a cow, the sexual adventures of Eula Varner Snopes, and the wild saturnalia of the spotted horses auction, a comic masterpiece. The Library of America edition of Faulkner's work publishes for the first time new, corrected texts of The Unvanquished,If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and The Hamlet. The corrected text of Absalom,Absalom! was published by Random House in 1986. Manuscripts, typescripts, galleys, and published editions have been collated to produce versions that are faithful to Faulkner's intentions and free of the changes introduced by subsequent editors.

This is the second volume of Faulkner’s trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South. Like its predecessor, The Hamlet, and its successor, The Mansion, The Town is completely self-contained, but it gains resonance from being read with the other two. The story of Flem Snopes’s ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the book is rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humor and profundity.

“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner   Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”

The complete text of Faulkner’s third novel, published for the first time in 1973, appeared with his reluctant consent in a much cut version in 1929 as Sartoris.

A classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black who has long refused to adopt the black's traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused of murdering a white man. A classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of family members in the South.

Faulkner's great comic novel moves on the wheels of breathless suspense. Lucius Priest, Boon Hogganbeck, and Ned McCaslin "borrow" Lucius grandfather's automobile at the beginning of a hilarious journey that pales in comparison to what awaits the reivers (plunderers or freebooters) in Memphis. Ned trades the auto for a most dubious racehorse. How the reivers grapple with the crisis is the mainspring of the story which leads from a brothel to a brush with the law to the most bizarre horse racing in fact or fiction! The wild humor and the frenetic action will not, however, obscure to the listener that "The Reivers," like all of Faulkner's work, is about moving and tender human relationships and moral insights into human conduct.