Which American author wrote 'The Sound and the Fury'?

William Faulkner wrote the novel “The Sound and the Fury.” Published in 1929, it follows the collapse of the Compson family in the fictional Mississippi setting of Yoknapatawpha County.

The novel is famous for its demanding modernist structure. Its first three sections use stream-of-consciousness narration through Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compson, while the final section shifts to a more conventional third-person perspective centered partly on Dilsey. The story moves through time rather than presenting events in straightforward order.

Faulkner first imagined the Compson material as short stories about children, then expanded it into a novel. The title comes from Macbeth, in which life is described as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” The book was published on October 7, 1929.

Readers sometimes confuse the novel’s fictional county with a real place or assume the title refers mainly to Quentin. In fact, the family’s broader history and the contrasting perspectives of all four sections are central to the book. Its critical reputation later helped Faulkner gain the attention associated with his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.