Robert McCrum, in his Guardian article of October 6, 2014, The 100 best novels: No 55-As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930), writes: “apart from Mark Twain (No 23 in this series), no other American writer before Faulkner had ever immersed his readers so completely in the vernacular language and culture of a society that was, and perhaps still is, so deeply foreign to mainstream American experience.” McCrum proposes that despite their American setting, Faulkner’s novels would have been exotic to the vast majority of his readers, who would have encountered unfamiliar scenes. These include poverty, religious extremism, and technological and social backwardness. Critics ascribe Faulkner’s works to the Southern Gothic genre because they engage with the darker, more macabre elements of the White Southern experience following the loss of the Civil War. His fiction, including As I Lay Dying, takes place in the invented Yoknapatawpha County, which Faulkner based on his native Lafayette County. Faulkner’s novels present a detailed evocation of daily life in his native Mississippi while engaging with the classical and modernist tradition in Western literature.

His novels and works of short fiction, including The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Faulkner (1897-1962) was a writer from Oxford, Mississippi.

Faulkner william as i lay dying