The Sound and the Fury
- Written By William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury
- William Faulkner
$19.99
Time keeps the score. The Compsons keep losing.
In Jefferson, Mississippi, the name Compson once carried weight and opened doors. Now their pasture has been sold to build a golf course, the man of the house drinks himself toward an early gravest, and his prideful wife succumbs to hypochondria and self-pity. The four Compson siblings are left to carry the collapse alone, each in a different way: Benjy, unable to tell past from present, relives the same afternoon on a loop; Quentin weighs his own worth against a long forgotten code of honor; Jason tallies grievances and entitlements, intending to collect. And Caddy, the sister whom these other three orbit, slips past the edges of the story itself, forcing them all to reckon with what she leaves behind.
Across four days, each sibling takes a turn narrating the Compsons’ lives. Told through four radically different points of view, the novel moves without warning between minds and across decades. Scholars have long ranged The Sound and the Fury among the essential achievements of literary modernism, proof that structure itself can carry meaning. Nearly a century later, it still shapes how novelists render memory, grief, and a family’s slow unraveling.
“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.”
About the Author
- William Faulkner
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897 and raised in nearby Oxford, which became his model for Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional landscape appearing in more than a dozen of his novels. He left school early, worked briefly as a postmaster, and spent time in New Orleans among writers before publishing his first novel in 1926.
In The Sound and the Fury, published three years later, Faulkner found his fullest voice: fractured, intimate, and unmoored. This was followed within a year by the equally uncompromising As I Lay Dying. To make ends meet between novels, he wrote for MGM, and later Warner Bros., contributing to films including To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. By the mid-1940s, he was better known in Hollywood than in American letters — until Malcolm Cowley’s 1946 anthology, The Portable Faulkner, reintroduced his body of work. Three years later, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
