Author Guide · Southern Modernist Fiction
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In 1929 William Faulkner was working night shifts at the power plant of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, and he began writing As I Lay Dying there; it came out in 1930, a year after The Sound and the Fury. Almost all of his best work is set in one invented place, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, modelled on the county around Oxford, where he lived most of his life. He also spent years writing for Hollywood to pay his bills. In 1950 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949, and he later won two Pulitzer Prizes. This guide covers his 12 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1929–1962 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
William Faulkner’s best-known books are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). He won the 1949 Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962). Start with As I Lay Dying. Below are his 12 key books in order, and the rest of his work grouped by kind.
Where to Start with William Faulkner
If you want the most approachable of his great novels
→ As I Lay Dying (1930) — short, funny and dark, told in fifteen voices.
If you want his defining book
→ The Sound and the Fury (1929) — the fall of the Compson family, told four ways.
If you want his stories first
→ Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950) — including “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning”.
If you want the lighter, late Faulkner
→ The Reivers (1962) — a boy’s road trip to Memphis in 1905.
12 William Faulkner Books, in Order
The Sound and the Fury
The decline of the Compson family of Jefferson, Mississippi, told in four sections. The first three are narrated by the brothers Benjy, who is intellectually disabled, Quentin and Jason; the fourth is told in the third person, centred on Dilsey, the family’s Black servant. All of them circle their sister Caddy. The opening section, in Benjy’s mind, moves between years without warning.
As I Lay Dying
Addie Bundren dies, and her husband and children carry her coffin by wagon to Jefferson to bury her, through flood and fire. The story is told in 59 short sections by 15 narrators, mostly family members, each with a reason of their own for making the trip. Faulkner began it while working night shifts at the university power plant.
Sanctuary
Temple Drake, a college student, falls into the hands of a bootlegger called Popeye and ends up in a Memphis brothel, while the lawyer Horace Benbow tries to defend a man accused of a murder Popeye committed. Faulkner wrote it partly to make money. It was filmed in 1933 as The Story of Temple Drake.
Light in August
Two stories run alongside each other. Lena Grove, pregnant, walks from Alabama to Mississippi looking for the father of her child. Joe Christmas, a man who does not know whether he has Black ancestry, is driven by that uncertainty to violence. Around them stand the disgraced minister Gail Hightower and the town of Jefferson.
Absalom, Absalom!
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson in 1833 with a band of enslaved men and builds a plantation out of nothing, then sees his dynasty destroyed. The story is pieced together decades later, partly by Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate Shreve in 1910, from rumour and memory. The first edition included Faulkner’s own map of Yoknapatawpha County.
The Unvanquished
Seven linked stories about Bayard Sartoris and Ringo, the Black boy who grows up beside him, during the Civil War and Reconstruction. It moves from boys’ adventure to a final story in which Bayard, as a young man, refuses to avenge his father’s murder with a gun.
The Hamlet
Flem Snopes and his relatives move into Frenchman’s Bend, a hamlet in Yoknapatawpha, and Flem takes over its business one deal at a time. Much of it is comic, including the sale of a herd of wild spotted horses. It is the first book of the Snopes trilogy, followed by The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959).
Go Down, Moses
Seven linked stories about the McCaslin family and its white and Black descendants, bound together by the crimes of its founder, Carothers McCaslin. It includes “The Bear”, in which Isaac McCaslin learns to hunt in the big woods and later gives up the land he would inherit.
Intruder in the Dust
Lucas Beauchamp, a proud Black farmer, is arrested for the murder of a white man, and a lynch mob gathers. A white teenager, Chick Mallison, and an elderly woman, Miss Habersham, dig up the evidence that clears him. MGM filmed it in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1949.
Collected Stories of William Faulkner
Forty-two stories, arranged by Faulkner in six sections, including “A Rose for Emily”, “Barn Burning”, “Dry September” and “That Evening Sun”. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1951.
A Fable
Set over a week on the Western Front in 1918, when a French corporal and his twelve followers lead a regiment to refuse to attack, and the fighting briefly stops. The story closely parallels the Passion of Christ. It is one of his few novels set outside Mississippi, and it won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award.
The Reivers
Published a month before he died. In 1905 eleven-year-old Lucius Priest goes on a secret trip to Memphis with Boon Hogganbeck, who has “borrowed” Lucius’s grandfather’s car, and Ned McCaslin, who trades it for a racehorse. It won a second, posthumous Pulitzer in 1963, and was filmed in 1969 with Steve McQueen.
In What Order to Read William Faulkner
The books stand alone, but they share one county, and families like the Compsons, Sartorises, McCaslins and Snopeses come back from book to book. Quentin Compson, who narrates part of The Sound and the Fury, is also one of the tellers of Absalom, Absalom!, and the two books read well one after the other. The Snopes trilogy should be read in order: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion.
Publication order is not the easiest way in. Many readers start with As I Lay Dying or the stories, then go on to Light in August, and leave The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, the two hardest, until they know how he works.
A reading path
1. As I Lay Dying (1930)
2. Collected Stories (1950)
3. Light in August (1932)
4. The Sound and the Fury (1929)
5. Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Everything Else William Faulkner Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 16 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Early novels
3
3 books · 1926–1929
- 1926Soldiers’ Payhis first novel, about a wounded airman coming home
- 1927Mosquitoesset among artists in New Orleans
- 1929Sartorishis first Yoknapatawpha novel; the full text appeared in 1973 as Flags in the Dust
Other novels
5
5 books · 1935–1959
- 1935Pylonbarnstorming pilots in New Orleans
- 1939The Wild Palmstwo alternating stories; also published as If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
- 1951Requiem for a Nunpart novel, part play; a sequel to Sanctuary
- 1957The TownSnopes trilogy, book two
- 1959The MansionSnopes trilogy, book three
Story collections
5
5 books · 1931–1979
- 1931These 13includes A Rose for Emily
- 1934Doctor Martino and Other Stories
- 1949Knight’s Gambitdetective stories with Gavin Stevens
- 1955Big Woodshunting stories
- 1979Uncollected Stories of William Faulknerposthumous
Poetry
2
2 books · 1924–1933
- 1924The Marble Faunhis first book
- 1933A Green Bough
Posthumous
1
1 book · 1973
- 1973Flags in the Dustthe original, longer version of Sartoris
The years · 1897–1962
Quick facts about William Faulkner
- Known for
- Novels set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, told through shifting narrators and long, winding sentences about Southern families and the history of race and slavery.
- 1897
- Born in New Albany, Mississippi
- 1936
- Absalom, Absalom!
- 1950
- Receives the 1949 Nobel Prize
- 1962
- Dies in Byhalia, Mississippi
- Born
- 25 September 1897, New Albany, Mississippi; born Falkner, the spelling changed in 1918
- Died
- 6 July 1962, Byhalia, Mississippi, aged 64
- Lived
- Oxford, Mississippi, at Rowan Oak
- Nobel Prize
- Literature, 1949 (received in 1950), “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”
- Pulitzer Prizes
- A Fable (1955) and The Reivers (1963)
- Hollywood
- Worked on about 50 films from 1932 to 1954, including To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946)
The red mark is 1929: The Sound and the Fury, the novel of the Compson family.
How William Faulkner Writes: One County, Many Voices
Faulkner tells a story from inside the heads of the people living it, and often from several at once. The Sound and the Fury gives the same family through three brothers and then an outside narrator; As I Lay Dying uses fifteen voices. He drops the reader into a mind without explaining where or when they are, and expects them to piece it together, as Quentin and Shreve piece together Sutpen’s story in Absalom, Absalom!
His sentences can run for pages, piling up clauses and qualifications, and his time scheme jumps between decades. The point is that in his South the past is never finished: slavery, the Civil War and the line between Black and white families keep shaping the present. As Gavin Stevens says in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Almost everything is set in Yoknapatawpha County, an imagined version of the county around Oxford. He drew a map of it for Absalom, Absalom!, and the same families, towns and minor characters recur across his novels and stories, so his books add up to the history of one place. He also wrote plenty of comedy, from the Snopes horse-trading in The Hamlet to The Reivers.
Watch
William Faulkner reads his Nobel Prize speech
No filmed interview with Faulkner survives, so this is the next best thing: his own voice, delivering the speech he gave at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm in December 1950, with its famous line that man will not merely endure but prevail.
Frequently asked questions about William Faulkner’s books
How many books has William Faulkner written?
He published 19 novels, counting the linked-story books The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses, plus story collections, two books of poems and several posthumous books. This page lists 28: the 12 key books and 16 more in the bibliography.
What are William Faulkner’s books in order?
His key books in order: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Collected Stories (1950), A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962).
Where should I start with William Faulkner?
As I Lay Dying is a good start: it is short, it is often funny, and its fifteen narrators teach you how he works. The stories, such as “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning”, are another way in.
What is William Faulkner’s most famous book?
The Sound and the Fury (1929), the story of the Compson family told by three brothers and an outside narrator. As I Lay Dying, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! are close behind.
What is Yoknapatawpha County?
The fictional county in northern Mississippi where most of Faulkner’s books are set, with Jefferson as its county seat. It is based on Lafayette County, around Oxford, where he lived.
What prizes did William Faulkner win?
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949, which he received in Stockholm in 1950; the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, for A Fable (1955) and, after his death, The Reivers (1963); and the National Book Award twice, for Collected Stories (1951) and A Fable (1955).
Why is The Sound and the Fury hard to read?
Its first section is told by Benjy Compson, who is intellectually disabled and experiences past and present at once, so the narrative jumps between years without warning. The second, Quentin’s, follows a stream of consciousness on the day of his death in 1910. The last two sections are more straightforward and fill in what happened.
Did William Faulkner write for Hollywood?
Yes. From 1932 to 1954 he worked on about 50 films, mostly for money. He has screenwriting credits on To Have and Have Not (1944), from Hemingway’s novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), from Raymond Chandler’s.
What were Faulkner’s views on race and segregation?
His fiction is centrally about race in the South, but his public statements in 1956 were contested. In a February 1956 interview he said that if it came to fighting he would side with Mississippi against the United States, which he quickly disavowed. In a Life essay the following month he urged desegregation campaigners to “go slow now”. James Baldwin was among those who criticised his position.
When did William Faulkner die?
On 6 July 1962, aged 64, in Byhalia, Mississippi, of a heart attack, a few weeks after a fall from his horse. The Reivers had come out a month earlier.
Footnotes
- William Faulkner — Wikipedia
- William Faulkner bibliography — Wikipedia
- William Faulkner — Facts, NobelPrize.org
- The Reivers — Wikipedia
- William Faulkner’s Southern Guilt — The New Republic
- Not even past — Wikipedia
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
— William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951), spoken by Gavin Stevens
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