The four novels in this Library of America collection show Faulkner at the
height of his powers and fully demonstrate the range of his genius. They explore
the tragic and comic aspects of a South haunted by its past and uncertain of its
future. In the intricate, spellbinding masterpiece Absalom, Absalom (1936), Quentin
Compson descends into a vortex of images, voices, passions, and doomed desires
as he and his Harvard roommate re-create the story of Thomas Sutpen and the
insane ambitions, romantic hopes, and distortions of honor and conscience that
trap Sutpen and those around him, until their grief and pride and fate become
the inescapable and