He came home from the war with a scarred face and a shattered memory. The town welcomed him. The women fought over him. And no one knew that he was already dead.
William Faulkner’s first novel is a haunting portrait of the Lost Generation—a story of a wounded soldier, the people who claim to love him, and the terrible emptiness of the world he left behind.
Donald Mahon, a young aviator, returns to his small Georgia town after being horribly wounded in World War I. His face is disfigured. His memory is gone. He is brought home by Joe Gilligan, a rough soldier who has no one else, and Margaret Powers, a mysterious widow who may be his fiancée—or may not. In the town, Mahon is fought over by his father, a dignified Episcopal priest; his former lover, Cecily, who is engaged to someone else; and a young woman named Emmy, who has waited for him and will never stop waiting. None of them see him. They see only their own need. Mahon drifts toward death, and the novel ends with a funeral, a train station, and two soldiers who have nothing left to say to each other.
This is Faulkner at his most early and elegiac: a novel about the gap between the heroism we expect and the damage we refuse to see. Soldier’s Pay announced a major new voice in American literature—raw, lyrical, and unsparing.
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Faulkner’s first novel, published in 1926
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Written in New Orleans with the encouragement of Sherwood Anderson
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A Lost Generation novel in the tradition of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, but darker and more Southern
Available in multiple formats:
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Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.
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A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the hardest war to survive is the one that never ends.
About the Author
William Faulkner (1897–1962) was an American novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, he spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, the model for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Soldier’s Pay was his first novel, written after he left the University of Mississippi (without a degree) and spent time in New Orleans, where he was befriended by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson encouraged Faulkner to write about his native Mississippi. Faulkner took the advice—but not immediately. Soldier’s Pay is set in Georgia, not Mississippi, and shows the influence of the European modernists (Joyce, Eliot) and the Lost Generation writers (Hemingway, Fitzgerald). The novel was published to modest reviews and sold poorly. Faulkner later said he wrote it “to get a job” and “to prove I could write a novel.” His later masterpieces include The Sound and the Fury(1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize twice. He died of a heart attack in 1962.
