Collected Stories

Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank. Rejected by the US military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925. His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notably The Blue Lamp, co-written with Raymond Chandler. William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize for The Reivers just before his death in July 1962.

In this extraordinary collection, Faulkner captures the bitter tensions of America's Deep South. Beneath an unrelenting sun, the themes of pride, intense passion, the overbearing influence of women and the spectres of the past are played out in stories of memorable power. Faulkner's muscular, vivid prose lays bare the anguish of a land riven by violence and racial conflict, and the pathos, dignity and troubled history of its people. 'If you imagine Huckleberry Finn living in the House of Usher and telling stories white the walls crumble about him, that will give you the double quality of Faulkner's work at its best'