A masterful novel set in 1920s Louisiana, The Missing is the story of Sam Simoneaux, a floorwalker at a New Orleans department store. When a little girl is kidnapped on Sam’s watch he is haunted by guilt, grief, and ghosts from his own troubled past. Determined to find her, Sam sets out on a journey through a world of music and violence, where riverboats teem with drinking and dancing, and where dark swamplands conceal those who choose to live by their own laws. With the fate of the stolen child looming, The Missing vividly depicts an America lurching away from war, where civilization is only beginning to penetrate the hinterlands, and a man must choose between compassion and vengeance.

Although William Faulkner's imagination is often considered solely tragic, it actually blended what Faulkner himself called the bizarre and the terrible. Not only did Faulkner's vision encompass both comedy and tragedy; it perceived a latent humor in tragedy and vice versa. As a result, Faulkner's fiction is seldom simply comic or simply tragic. Faulkner's comedy incorporates tragedy and despair, and the humor in his novels may serve as well to intensify as to relieve a tragic or horrific effect. This study examines Faulkner's first nine novels, from Soldiers' Pay to Absalom, Absalom!, showing how humor is used to express theme: how it appears in the action, characters, and discourse of each novel; and how it contributes to the overall effect of each novel. In each case, even in the most pained and angry novels, Faulkner's practice of humor expresses his view that humor is an inseparable element of human experience. Ryuichi Yamaguchi is Professor of English and American literature at the Aichi University in Japan.

Through detailed analyses of individual texts, from the earliest poetry through Go Down, Moses, Singal traces Faulkner's attempt to liberate himself from the powerful and repressive Victorian culture in which he was raised by embracing the Modernist culture of the artistic avant-garde. Most important, it shows how Faulkner accommodated the conflicting demands of these two cultures by creating a set of dual identities - one, that of a Modernist author writing on the most daring and subversive issues of his day, and the other, that of a southern country gentleman loyal to the conservative mores of his community. It is in the clash between these two selves, Singal argues, that one finds the key to making sense of Faulkner.

This history of Lafayette County, Mississippi, uses William Faulkner's rich fictional portrait of a place and its people to illuminate the past. From the arrival of Europeans in Chickasaw Indian territory in 1540 to Faulkner's death in 1962, Doyle chronicles more than four centuries of local history. 27 illustrations. 3 maps.

Presents critical essays reflecting a variety of schools of criticism for The sound and the fury.

REA's MAXnotes for William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.