The Sound and the Fury

First UK edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. ix-[xii], 321, [1, colophon], [4, ads], [2, blank]. Two conjugate leaves of publisher's adverts to rear. Recent half claret morocco over marbled boards, raised bands and gold tooling to spine, gilt titled buckram panel to backstrip, red-stained top edges; bottom edges rough-trimmed. Additional title panel tipped in to back endpaper. With an Introduction by Richard Hughes.

First issue of the U.K. edition, originally bound in black cloth with red lettering to spine. The much more common yellow-tan cloth binding is a same year later issue, lacking publisher's adverts, with top edges unstained, and bottom edges trimmed. 1/2,000 copies printed.

Light toning to a couple of blank prelims., else Fine.

Author's fourth novel and second to be published in England on 16 April, 1931, priced at 7s. 6d. Often referred to, as Faulkner's favourite amongst his own novels, The Sound and the Fury caused him the greatest trouble in its conception. A masterpiece in the Southern Gothic tradition, set in Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, it depicts through its four fractured narratives the gradual disintegration of the once aristocratic Compson family, and, implicitly, of an entire social order.

As a device to differentiate the time shifts amongst the different narrators the author toyed with the idea of using different coloured inks, but no such printing innovation existed in 1929, at the time of its first publication by the New York outfit of Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. An announced 1933 Random House edition, with a proposed introduction by Faulkner, utilizing this process, was eventually shelved.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked the book sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The 1959 film adaptation, based on a screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., and directed by Martin Ritt, starred Yul Brynner, Joanne Woodward, Ethel Waters, Margaret Leighton, Stuart Whitman, et al. Recipient of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

[Massey 326; Petersen A6.28a]