Of the twenty books for which William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are considered by critics and general readers most representative of his work. The unsparing chronicler of the South, Faulkner is far more than a regional novelist; he is the observer and critic of a doomed but tenacious civilization. His imaginary world is all of the South cherishing the relics of a lost age of glory....