Of the seventeen books by which William Faulkner has achieved an international reputation as one of America’s leading novelists, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are considered most representative. The unsparing chronicler of the South, Faulkner is far more than a regional novelist; he is the observer and critic of a doomed but tenacious civilization. His imaginary world is all of the South cherishing the relics of a lost age of glory. For The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner contributes a brilliant Appendix which serves as his own last word on this controversial book