April 7, 1929: William Faulkner Publishes "The Sound and the Fury”

April 7, 1929: William Faulkner publishes The Sound and the Fury, introducing the Compson family of Jefferson, Mississippi.

The title comes from William Shakespeare's 1606 play Macbeth, when the title character realizes he's lost his kingdom, his wife, everything but his own life, all through his own fault: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. He dropped out of the University of Mississippi, and took a civilian job with the Postal Service, where locals often caught him reading on the job. The locals called him "Count No 'Count." ("No-account" is an old Southern term for being worthless.)

But in 1927, he published Sartoris, creating the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. (Don't try to pronounce it.) This was followed by several other novels set there, including The Sound and the Fury in 1929, As I Lay Dying in 1930, and Absalom, Absalom! in 1936.

Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury in stream-of-consciousness, and it was nonlinear: Part 1 took place on April 7, 1928; Part 2, on June 2, 1910, and thus a flashback, including the suicide of Quentin Compson at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Part 3, on April 6, 1928, the day before Part 1; and Part 4, on April 8, 1928, the day after Part 1. It was Easter weekend.

Faulkner's theme was that the Compson family couldn't escape the consequences of long-ago actions. He wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Fitting words from America's most Southern of novelists, published only 64 years after the end of the Civil War, when many people who remembered it were still alive.

The Sound and the Fury has been filmed in 1959 and 2014. Faulkner died on July 6, 1962, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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April 7, 1929 was a Sunday, an odd day on which to publish a book. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the hockey season had ended 9 days earlier, when the Boston Bruins beat the defending Champion New York Rangers for the Stanley Cup. So there were no scores on this historic day.