This Norton Critical Edition includes:The Sound and the Fury,A reimagined preface, revised headnotes, and expanded footnotes by Michael Gorra to contextualize, among other aspects, racial epithets and biblical allusions.Additional writings by Faulkner, ranging from selected letters to his address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.Contextual materials illuminating contemporary responses to the novel and the cultural and historical environment of Faulkner’s Mississippi, featuring new photographs of Oxford by George G. Stewart.Over 15 critical essays.A selected bibliography and a chronology. William Faulkner (1897–1962) is the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying , among other works. These two novels were originally published by Liveright in the 1920s. Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation and, for his work as a reviewer, of the Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. His books include The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War ; Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of on American Masterpiece , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Bells in Their Silence : Travels through Germany; After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie; The English Novel at Mid-Century ; and, as editor, The Portable Conrad and the Norton Critical Editions of The Sound and the Fury and The Portrait of a Lady.