Faulkner's famous tragic narrative of the Bundren family's trek across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother, is a true 20th-century masterpiece. In terms of organisation, language, and drama, As I Lay Dying is one of the most important works in American fiction. The novel, which is told in turn by each member of the family, including Addie and others, fluctuates in mood from dark humour to deep pathos. The Sound and the Fury, a provocative and perplexing novel by William Faulkner published in 1929, is largely regarded as one of the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century. This new Norton Critical Edition builds on the merits of its predecessors while paying special attention to the novel's contemporary reception as well as its diverse cultural and historical surroundings. The text for the Third Edition is based on Noel Polk's meticulously produced corrected text, which is preceded by a textual note. The annotations by David Minter, which were aimed to help readers understand complex phrases and allusions, have been kept. Some of Faulkner's most memorable characters appear in Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, including guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, who is looking for the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry. The narrative of Thomas Sutpen, an intriguing stranger who arrived in Jefferson township in the early 1830s, is told in Absalom, Absalom! He pulled a beautiful estate out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness with the help of a French architect and a gang of wild Haitians. "He wanted sons, and the sons devastated him," Faulker observed of Sutpen. Sutpen's ruthlessness and single-minded disregard for the human community haunted not only his contemporaries but also men who came after him, men like Quentin Compson, who were haunted even into the twentieth century by Sutpen's legacy of ruthlessness and single-minded disregard for the human community.