Dec 25, 2009

As I Lay Dying | Literary Precedents

Like Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915) or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), both of which portray communities through individual speakers and stories, Faulkner also uses interior monologues in As I Lay Dying. Faulkner admired Anderson's work in Winesburg, Ohio, and had spent time with Anderson in New Orleans a few years prior to the publication of As I Lay Dying, and for a time, both Faulkner and Masters were published by Boni and Liveright.

Faulkner's own The Sound and the Fury is a more immediate literary precedent to...