William Faulkner's the man. The Southern Goth dude. If there is one name you absolutely need to know in relation to this movement, it's his.

Not only is Faulkner's work pretty much the embodiment of the Southern Gothic style, the dude was also seriously prolific. He was so fast at writing that he wrote one novel, As I Lay Dying, in six weeks. Six weeks, folks.

Faulkner's work has it all: the macabre and the grotesque, loads of decay and disintegration, and a very serious obsession with the Civil War. That's pretty much everything you could want in your Southern Gothic fiction.

Faulkner, who spent his whole life (with the exception of a few years) in Mississippi, made up a whole fictional Southern county to set his works in. It's called Yoknapatawpha County, and it's one of the vastest and most complex geographical and social creations in the history of literature—sort of like Middle Earth, but in Mississippi.

The Sound and the Fury

This novel tells of the disintegration of the Compsons, a Southern family.

Let's just say there are a lot of disintegrating families in Faulkner's work, but maybe none more famous than this one.

The Sound and the Fury is important not only because of its Southern Gothic themes but also because of its incredibly innovative narrative style. Each of the following chapters is narrated from the perspective of a different member of the Compson family. The first chapter of the book, in particular, will set your head spinning: it's narrated from the perspective of a character—Benjy Compson—who is cognitively disabled.

Absalom, Absalom!

Narrated mostly from the perspective of Quentin Compson (yup, one of the characters in The Sound and the Fury), Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, who shows up in Yoknapatawpha County before the Civil War, hell-bent on building a huge plantation for himself.

Things don't go so well for Sutpen, especially when his family starts falling apart. Hey, this is Southern Gothic lit; did you expect the family to be functional?

Shmoops:

Race is a huge theme in Faulkner's work. Explore these quotations from Absalom, Absalom! dealing with race here to see how important it is for this writer.

How does Faulkner deal with social issues? Delve into these quotations from The Sound and the Fury which grapple with Southern social values and principles to find out.