The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner [140]
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VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
William Faulkner, James Joyce, Philip Roth, Thomas Mann, Doris Lessing, Albert Camus, V. S. Naipaul, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy, among many others: VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL is a bold series of trade paperback books devoted to publishing the best writing of the last century from the world over. Offering both classic and contemporary fiction and literary nonfiction in elegant editions, VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL aims to introduce a new generation of readers to world-class writing that has stood the test of time and essential works by the preeminent authors of today.
APPROACHING WILLIAM FAULKNER
As with any great literature, there are probably as many ways to read William Faulkner’s writing as there are readers. There are hundreds of books devoted to interpretations of his novels, numerous biographies, and every year high school teachers and college professors guide their students through one or more of the novels. But after all is said and done, there are the books themselves, and the pleasure of reading them can be deep and lasting. The language Faulkner uses ranges from the poetically beautiful, nearly biblical to the coarse sounds of rough dialect. His characters linger in the mind, whether for their heroism or villainy, their stoicism or self-indulgence, their honesty or deceitfulness or self-deception, their wisdom or stupidity, their gentleness or cruelty. In short, like Shakespeare, William Faulkner understood what it means to be human.
Much of Faulkner’s fiction is set in the fictional Mississippi county Yoknapatawpha (Yok’na pa taw pha) and most of his characters are southerners who, to one degree or another, are struggling with life in a country that has experienced defeat, resisting change, and dealing with a lingering nostalgia for a time that many of them never knew. Faulkner’s South is, of course, a segregated South, and most of his characters are white southerners, many of whom have not and will not accept the reality of racial equality. Faulkner himself became involved in the early Civil Rights struggle, but being a southerner who rarely left the small Mississippi college town where he grew up, he understood the difficulty of the racial divide, and in his writing we can find some of the most subtle explanations of the difficult relationship