Essays examine Faulkner's style and themes in The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom!, and As I Lay Dying, and are accompanied by a brief chronology of the author's life.

Includes index.

Discovery of evil / Cleanth Brooks -- The hamlet / Michael Millgate -- The bear / Richard Poirier -- The sound and the fury and The bear / James Guetti -- Light in August / Joseph W. Reed, Jr. -- The wild palms / Irving Howe -- The last novelist / Hugh Kenner -- Doubling and incest / John T. Irwin -- Faulkner's misogyny / Albert J. Guerard -- The self's own lamp / David Minter -- Working through : Faulkner's Go down Moses / Richard H. King -- An odor of Sartoris : William Faulkner's The unvanquished / Alan Holder -- As I lay dying reconsidered / Jan Bakker -- William Faulkner : a feminist consideration / Judith Bryant Wittenberg -- Incredulous narration : Absalom, Absalom! / Peter Brooks -- A new beginning : "the thunder and the music of the prose" (1921 to 1925) / Judith L. Sensibar.