Introduction & Overview of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury Introduction

The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, was William Faulkner's fourth novel and is considered his first masterpiece. The story is set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner created for the setting of his third novel Sartoris . Faulkner set fifteen of his novels and many short stories in this geographical location that he invented, the descriptions of which mirror the area in northern Mississippi where he spent most of his life. While he is called a Southern writer, most critics praise this book and many of Faulkner's other fictional works for their universal and humanistic themes. The book was published in the year of the great stock market crash on Wall Street in 1929 and sales were meager. Faulkner did, however, gain considerable critical recognition for the work.

Before writing The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner found himself overly involved with the problem of...
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