In discussing As I Lay Dying, he was fond of saying that he was very conscious of the novel’s potential to be embraced as a sprawling American classic. William Faulkner said that, with As I Lay Dying, he deliberately set out to write a classic.įaulkner was one of the more blunt novelists of his era, having little time or regard for self-promotion or any examination of his process. The book was composed on a wheelbarrow that he turned into a table. (His earlier novels, while well-regarded, did not provide much in the way of royalties.) For around six weeks, he wrote from midnight until four in the morning while at the plant. The novelist, who was a high school and college dropout, claimed he wrote As I Lay Dying while working at a Mississippi power plant. It can sometimes be difficult to sort Faulkner’s own personal mythology from facts.
William Faulkner claimed he wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks. Though critics continue to see the two works as inextricably linked, Faulkner himself was once quoted as saying he never thought of the novels “in the same breath.” 2. The next year, the author released As I Lay Dying, a similarly stylized book about the impoverished Bundren family’s struggles to bury their matriarch, Addie, in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. It wasn’t an immediate success when it was released in 1929, but it’s since been recognized as one of the author’s essential works.
As I Lay Dying has much in common with The Sound and the Fury.įor six months, Faulkner put everything he had into writing The Sound and the Fury, a story that uses multiple narrators and a stream-of-consciousness style to chronicle the decline of the formerly aristocratic Compson family. Here are some facts about the book and Faulkner’s very deliberate undertaking of writing a “classic.” 1. It’s since become regarded as an American classic-and a bit of an endurance test for some readers.
Released in 1930, author William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying appeared to be an impossibly ambitious undertaking the novel has 15 different narrators over 59 chapters.
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