The Sound and the Fury.

FAULKNER, William.

$9,200.00

Item Number: 139490

New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929.

First edition, first printing of Faulkner’s masterpiece. Octavo, original half cloth over black and white patterned paper boards. Very good in a very good second state dust jacket with Humanity Uprooted priced at $3.50 instead of $3.00 on the rear panel. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story, which Faulkner later said was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention. The four parts of the novel relate many of the same episodes, each from a different point of view and therefore with emphasis on different themes and events. This interweaving and nonlinear structure makes any true synopsis of the novel difficult, especially since the narrators are all unreliable in their own way, making their accounts not necessarily trustworthy at all times. When Faulkner began writing the story that would develop into The Sound and the Fury, it "was tentatively titled ‘Twilight,’ [and] narrated by a fourth Compson child," but as the story progressed into a larger work, he renamed it, drawing its title from Macbeth's famous soliloquy from act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools, The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.