As I Lay Dying

The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family as they cart the coffin to Jefferson Mississippi to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament as American as Huckleberry Finn. Review A masterpiece of dark humour ―Daily ExpressThe greatest American writers of the last century were William Faulkner and Saul Bellow...As I Lay Dying andThe Adventures of Augie March: its hard to think of two better novels written in this country in any century -- Philip Roth ―ObserverOne of Americas greatest writers ―The TimesA beautiful novel ―IndependentBy universal consent of critics and common readers Faulkner is now recognised as the strongest American novelist of the century clearly surpassing (Ernest) Hemingway and (Scott) Fitzgerald and standing as an equal in the sequence that includes Hawthorne Melville Mark Twain and Henry James . . .As I Lay Dying may be the most original novel ever written by an American -- Harold Bloom About the Author Born in 1897 in New Albany Mississippi William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford Mississippi and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfathers bank.Rejected by the US military in 1915 he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925.His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930) Sanctuary (1931) Light in August (1932) Absalom Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s he worked in Hollywood on film scripts notably The Blue Lamp co-written with Raymond Chandler. William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize for The Reivers just before his death in July 1962.