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| Author | William Faulkner |
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| Publisher | Boni & Liveright |
Publication date | February 25, 1926 |
Soldiers' Pay is the first novel published by the American author William Faulkner. It was originally published by Boni & Liveright on February 25, 1926. [1] [2] It is unclear if Soldiers' Pay is the first novel written by Faulkner. It is however the first novel published by the author. Faulkner was working on two manuscripts while finishing Soldiers' Pay. [3]
The plot of Soldiers' Pay revolves around the return of a wounded aviator home to a small town in Georgia following the conclusion of the First World War. He is escorted by a veteran of the war, as well as a widow whose husband was killed during the conflict. The aviator himself suffered a horrendous head injury, and is left in a state of almost perpetual silence, as well as blindness. Several conflicts revolving around his return include the state of his engagement to his fiancée, the desire of the widow to break the engagement in order to marry the dying aviator herself, and the romantic intrigue surrounding the fiancée who had been less than faithful to the aviator in his absence. [4]
Soldier's Pay is one of only a few of the author's novels not set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
William Faulkner was a friend of American writer Sherwood Anderson and a member of his literary circle in 1920s New Orleans. As the story goes, it was Anderson who agreed to send the Soldiers' Pay manuscript to his publisher as long as Anderson himself did not have to read it.
In a 1950 letter from Faulkner's lifelong friend Phil Stone to Glenn O Carey, Stone acknowledges that it was Anderson who was instrumental in getting Soldiers' Pay published. "With all the efforts we made, I was not able to get Faulkner published and Sherwood Anderson was the one who got him started as far as publication goes." [5]
Horace Liveright agreed to pay Faulkner $200.00 for the manuscript, which was originally titled Mayday. Editor and chief at Boni & Liveright T.R. Smith is likely the source of the title change. [6] The first print run of Soldiers' Pay was 2,500 copies. [7]
By the standards of the day, Soldiers' Pay and Faulkner's second novel Mosquitoes were commercial failures. Neither novel sold more than 1,200 copies after its initial release. [8] Since Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, Soldiers' Pay has remained in print. [9] First edition copies are valuable among collectors, often selling for upwards of $35,000.
The original manuscript of Mayday from which Soldiers' Pay was edited was dedicated in Faulkner's manuscript to a love interest named Helen Baird. [10]
Hollywood producer Jerry Wald once considered making Soldiers' Pay into a movie. [11]
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).
Sartoris is a novel, first published in 1929, by the American author William Faulkner. It portrays the decay of the Mississippi aristocracy following the social upheaval of the American Civil War. The 1929 edition is an abridged version of Faulkner's original work. The full text was published in 1973 as Flags in the Dust. Faulkner's great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, himself a colonel in the American Civil War, served as the model for Colonel John Sartoris. Faulkner also fashioned other characters in the book on local people from his hometown Oxford. His friend Ben Wasson was the model for Horace Benbow, while Faulkner's brother Murry served as the antetype for young Bayard Sartoris.
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem is a novel by the American author William Faulkner published in 1939. The novel was originally published under the title The Wild Palms, which is the title of one of the two interwoven stories. This title was chosen by the publishers, Random House, over the objections of Faulkner's choice of a title. Subsequent editions have since been printed under the title If I Forget Thee Jerusalem, and since 2003 it is now usually referred to by both names, with the newer title following the historically first published title and in brackets, to avoid confusion: The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem].
William Clark Falkner was a military veteran, businessman, and author in northern Mississippi. He is most notable for the influence he had on the work of his great-grandson, author William Faulkner.
The Torrents of Spring is a novella written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926. Subtitled "A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race", Hemingway used the work as a spoof of the world of writers. It is Hemingway's first long work and was written as a parody of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter.
Rowan Oak was the home of author William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi. It is a primitive Greek Revival house built in the 1840s by Colonel Robert Sheegog, an Irish immigrant planter from Tennessee. Faulkner purchased the house when it was in disrepair in 1930 and did many of the renovations himself. Other renovations were done in the 1950s. One of its more famous features is the outline of Faulkner's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Fable, penciled in graphite and red on the plaster walls of his office. It is now owned and operated by the University of Mississippi as a museum, and is open to visitors year-round.
A Fable is a 1954 novel written by the American author William Faulkner. He spent more than a decade and tremendous effort on it, and aspired for it to be "the best work of my life and maybe of my time". It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Historically, it can be seen as a precursor to Joseph Heller's Catch-22.
Sarah Gertrude Millin, née Liebson, was a South African author.
The William Faulkner Foundation (1960-1970) was a charitable organization founded by the novelist William Faulkner in 1960 to support various charitable causes, all educational or literary in nature.
Flags in the Dust is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, completed in 1927. His publisher heavily edited the manuscript with Faulkner's reluctant consent, removing about 40,000 words in the process. That version was published as Sartoris in 1929. Faulkner's original manuscript of Flags in the Dust was published in 1973, and Sartoris was subsequently taken out of print.
Mosquitoes is a satiric novel by the American author William Faulkner. The book was first published in 1927 by the New York-based publishing house Boni & Liveright and is the author's second novel. Sources conflict regarding whether Faulkner wrote Mosquitoes during his time living in Paris, beginning in 1925 or in Pascagoula, Mississippi in the summer of 1926. It is, however, widely agreed upon that not only its setting, but also its content clearly reference Faulkner's personal involvement in the New Orleans creative community where he spent time before moving to France.
Louis Daniel Brodsky was an American poet, short story writer, and Faulkner scholar.
Horace Brisbin Liveright was an American publisher and stage producer. With Albert Boni, he founded the Modern Library and Boni & Liveright publishers. He published the books of numerous influential American and British authors. Turning to theatre, he produced the successful 1927 Broadway play Dracula, with Béla Lugosi and Edward Van Sloan in the roles they would make famous in the 1931 film by the same name.
William Faulkner (1897—1962) was an American writer who won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a stand-in for his hometown of Oxford in Lafayette County, Mississippi.
Boni & Liveright is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books. Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws. Their logo is of a cowled monk.
The Center for Faulkner Studies (CFS) is a research center located at Southeast Missouri State University. It is devoted to the study of the life and works of William Faulkner (1897–1962), the American author who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. The Center was established in 1989, after the university acquired the Louis Daniel Brodsky collection of Faulkner materials. The founding director of the CFS is Robert W. Hamblin, now Professor Emeritus of English at Southeast. He worked with Brodsky starting in 1979 to produce books, articles, lectures, and exhibits based on the materials in the collection. Dr. Christopher Rieger, Professor of English at Southeast, took Dr. Hamblin's place as the Center's director in 2013. Dr. Hamblin is now a volunteer consultant for the Center.
Maurice-Edgar Coindreau was a literary critic and translator of fiction from English into French and Spanish. He is notable for having introduced many canonical American authors of the 20th century—such as William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway—to the French-speaking public.
The University of Mississippi Power House was located on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. The original building was constructed in 1908 as a central power plant for the entire campus.
Bobby ("Robert") Wayne Hamblin is a poet, an author, and a professor emeritus at Southeast Missouri State University. He is best known for his achievements related to the works of William Faulkner.
Soldiers' Pay public domain audiobook at LibriVox | International | |
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