The Sound and the Fury: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

The masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner, and perhaps the greatest novel about the decline of the Southern aristocracy, now in Penguin Classics for the first time, 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 Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

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.

Story Locale:Mississippi

About the Author

William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature for what are recognized as some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, among them The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). For many of his literary chronicles of life in the American South, he drew on his native Mississippi, which informed one of his greatest creations, the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, where a number of his novels are set. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he won the National Book Award twice, for Collected Stories (1951) and A Fable (1954), and the Pulitzer Prize twice, for A Fable and The Reivers (1962).

Ayana Mathis (introduction) is the author of the New York Times bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and The Unsettled as well as a series of essays for The New York Times on literature and faith. She teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA program.

Author Residence: New York City (Mathis)

Author Hometown: New Albany, Mississippi (Faulkner); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Mathis)