The Sound and the Fury was published by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, New York, on 7 October 1929, in a first printing of approximately 1,789 copies priced at $3.00. It was Faulkner’s fourth novel, following Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Mosquitoes (1927), and Sartoris (1929), and it marked the explosion of a talent that would dominate American fiction for the next three decades. The novel sold poorly on publication — it took more than sixteen months to sell through the first printing — but it established Faulkner’s reputation among critics and fellow writers as the most daring prose experimentalist in the language.
The Novel
The novel tells the story of the Compson family of Jefferson, Mississippi — a once-distinguished Southern family in irreversible decline — through four sections narrated on four different days between 1928 and 1929. The structure is Faulkner’s most radical formal innovation: each section offers a different consciousness, a different relationship to time, and a different version of the same events.
Section One: April 7, 1928 (Benjy). The novel opens in the mind of Benjamin Compson, a thirty-three-year-old man with severe intellectual disability. Benjy’s narration moves freely between past and present without transition or explanation, guided by sensory associations — the smell of trees, the sound of his name, the fence of the golf course that was once the family’s pasture. Through Benjy’s consciousness, the reader gradually assembles the key events of the Compson family’s disintegration: the loss of the pasture (sold to pay for his brother Quentin’s year at Harvard), the promiscuity of his sister Caddy, and the pervasive atmosphere of loss that hangs over the household.
Section Two: June 2, 1910 (Quentin). The second section follows Quentin Compson during his last day at Harvard, before he drowns himself in the Charles River. Quentin’s narration is obsessive, circling endlessly around his sister Caddy’s sexuality and his own failure to act as the family’s moral guardian. The stream of consciousness is more fluid and associative than Benjy’s — Quentin is intelligent, educated, tortured by time and memory.
Section Three: April 6, 1928 (Jason). The third section, narrated by the Compsons’ youngest son, Jason IV, is a masterwork of sustained dramatic irony. Jason is bitter, venal, self-pitying, and cruel — and his narration, the most conventionally readable of the four, reveals the moral rot at the family’s core. He systematically steals the money that Caddy sends for the support of her illegitimate daughter, Quentin (named for her dead uncle).
Section Four: April 8, 1928 (Dilsey). The final section shifts to an omniscient narrator centred on Dilsey Gibson, the Compsons’ African American cook, whose endurance, faith, and moral clarity provide the novel’s only point of stability.
Literary Significance
The Sound and the Fury is the defining American modernist novel. Its experiments with narrative perspective, chronological disruption, and the representation of consciousness place it alongside Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway as one of the great technical achievements of twentieth-century fiction. Faulkner himself considered it his “most splendid failure” — the book in which he attempted the impossible and came closest to achieving it.
The novel’s influence is immeasurable. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and virtually every subsequent American novel that fractures chronology or inhabits damaged consciousness owes a debt to Faulkner’s method here. The Compson Appendix, written for the Viking Portable Faulkner in 1946, became a key text in its own right — Faulkner’s retrospective summary of the family’s history from 1699 to 1945.
Publication History and Collecting
First edition (1929, Cape and Smith): Approximately 1,789 copies in the first printing, priced at $3.00.
Identification points:
- The Cape and Smith imprint on the title page (not Random House, which acquired Smith’s list later)
- “First Published 1929” on the copyright page
- Price of $3.00 on the jacket flap
- The dust jacket features black and white geometric designs
First edition, first printing:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $30,000–$75,000
- Near Fine in jacket: $15,000–$30,000
- Without jacket: $2,000–$5,000
The first printing of 1,789 copies is exceptionally small for a novel that would become one of the canonical works of American literature. The combination of the tiny run, the fragile dust jacket, and Faulkner’s towering reputation makes fine copies in jacket among the scarcest and most valuable modern American firsts.
Signed copies exist but are uncommon. Faulkner signed more freely than Pynchon or Salinger but was not a prolific inscriber. Authenticated signed first editions in jacket have sold for $50,000–$100,000.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 2.5× for copies in jacket. Faulkner’s canonical status is secure, and the small first printing ensures scarcity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Faulkner’s best novel? It is the one Faulkner himself loved most, and many scholars consider it his greatest achievement. Others prefer Absalom, Absalom! for its narrative complexity or As I Lay Dying for its sustained formal daring. All three are supreme.
Is the Benjy section really that difficult? It is challenging on first reading because Benjy’s narration shifts between time periods without warning. Faulkner originally wanted to print different time periods in different-coloured inks, but the publisher refused. Most readers find that the section rewards patience — its emotional logic becomes clear even when its chronology does not.
Why is the first printing so small? Faulkner was an obscure novelist in 1929. His previous books had sold modestly, and his publisher had no reason to expect a large audience for an aggressively experimental novel.