It did not sell well because many competent readers were turned off by the novel’s challenging first portion. The American publisher Cape & Smith published ‘The Sound and the Fury’ on October 7, 1929, with the first edition of 1,789 copies. When ‘The Sound and the Fury’ was initially published in 1929, neither critics nor readers were impressed, probably as a result of how challenging the stream-of-consciousness style was. For ‘The Reivers’, he received a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963. Up until the day of his passing on July 6, 1962, he kept writing. A Fable earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and in 1956 he was appointed writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. State Department to Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Between 19, he traveled extensively as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Years after the publishing of ‘The Sounds and the Fury’, Faulkner received a new degree of respect at home as he rose to popularity on a global scale. In the wake of African-American slavery, the families in Faulkner’s novels are filled with miserly sons, dishonored daughters, and simmering resentments. Many of his books examine how the Southern aristocracy degraded after the Civil War and Reconstruction destroyed its wealth and way of life. The post-Civil War deterioration of the Deep South piqued Faulkner’s interest in particular. Even though he barely attended college for three semesters before leaving in 1920, he did start to discover his voice as a writer during that period. Although he never completed high school, his status as a military veteran allowed him to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1919. His forefathers took part in the Civil War, the Mexican-American War, and the Reconstruction.įaulkner wasn’t an especially good student. In 1897, William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, to a wealthy family.

In a list released in 1998 by The Modern Library, ‘The Sound and the Fury’ was ranked sixth in a list of the greatest English-language books of the 20th century.

The sound and the fury book