As I Lay Dying

First published in 1930, As I Lay Dying traces the Bundren family’s difficult journey to fulfill the wish of their dying matriarch, Addie. Told through a sequence of interior monologues, the novel unfolds in multiple voices, revealing conflicting motives, private grief, and the uneasy bond that holds the family together. Faulkner’s style—fragmented, intimate, and unguarded—captures the texture of thought itself, shifting between dark humor and quiet despair. The result is a work that examines how people make meaning from obligation, death, and estrangement, and how language both connects and isolates them. Now regarded as a defining work of twentieth-century fiction, As I Lay Dying remains compelling for its precise attention to voice and its unsentimental view of human endurance.

This Warbler Classics edition includes an essay by Robert Merrill on reading As I Lay Dying as modern tragedy as well as a detailed biographical timeline.

William Faulkner (1897–1962) was an American novelist and short story writer renowned for his profound influence on modernist literature and his creation of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a richly detailed setting based on Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner’s work often explored themes of the decay of the South, racial tensions, and complex family dynamics, as depicted in novels like The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner earned the Nobel Prize in Literature, two Pulitzer Prizes, and the National Book Award. He spent much of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, where he wrote prolifically; he also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. His legacy endures as one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century.

Robert Merrill is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he taught for thirty years and chaired for eleven. He is the author or editor of several books and has published more than fifty articles and reviews in such major journals as American Literature, Modern Philology, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in American Fiction, Narrative, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language.