The Sound and the Fury

The masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner, 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 decline of the American South through three generations of the once-powerful Compson family. In Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi—perhaps the most famous fictional setting in American literature—antiquated ideas of race, class, and sex prevail among the erstwhile landed gentry of the Reconstruction-era South, embodied in the Compson siblings: Benjy, whose mental disability blurs the past and the present; Quentin, who is consumed by his obsession with his family’s honor; Jason, who unleashes his blind rage on the rest of the household, especially their longtime Black servant, Dilsey; and their elusive sister, Caddy, whose tragic estrangement sets in motion the family’s fall from grace. A kaleidoscopic narrative punctuated by haunting interior monologues, The Sound and the Fury brings to life Faulkner’s aristocratic South as a land of decadence and despair, gallantry and greed in the face of financial and moral ruin. What Faulkner once considered his “most splendid failure” was also his favorite of his novels; it now ranks among the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and as one of the cornerstones of American fiction.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.