As she nears the end of her life, Addie Bundren wants nothing more than to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. A captivating and stylistically innovative work, the narrative revolves around the grim, yet darkly humorous, pilgrimage as the Bundren family sets out to fulfill her last wish.
Told from fifteen different points of view over fifty-nine chapters, As I Lay Dying vividly brings to life Faulkner’s imaginary South, and is replete with poignant, complex, violent, and fascinating characters.
William Faulkner (1897–1962) was a Nobel Prize–winning American novelist and short-story writer. One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, his reputation is based mostly on his novels, novellas, and short stories, but he was also a published poet and an occasional screenwriter. The majority of his works are based in his native state of Mississippi. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” He has often been cited as one of the most important writers in the history of American literature. In 1962, he was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction.