Backgrounds begins with the appendix Faulkner wrote in 1945 and sometimes referred to as another telling of The Sound and the Fury and includes a selection of Faulkner's letters, excerpts from two Faulkner interviews, a memoir by Faulkneris friend Ben Wasson, and both versions of Faulkner's 1933 introduction to the novel. Cultural and Historical Contexts presents four different perspectives on the place of the American South in history. Taken together, these works-by C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Carolyn Porter, and Robert Penn Warren-provide the reader with valuable contexts for understanding the novel. Criticism includes seventeen essays on The Sound and the Fury that collectively trace changes in the way we have viewed this novel over the last four decades. The critics are Jean-Paul Sartre, Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Michael Millgate, John T. Irwin, Myra Jehlen, Donald M. Kartiganer, David Minter, Warwick Wadlington, John T. Matthews, Thadious M. Davis, Wesley Morris and Barbara Alverson Morris, Minrose C. Gwin, Andre Bleikasten, and Philip M. Weinstein. A revised Selected Bibliography is also included.