Soldiers' Pay

William Faulkner

Jan 2022 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

The unforgettable tale of an American soldier’s return home from WWI by the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Sound and the Fury.

Lt. Donald Mahon served as a fighter pilot in the Great War. After suffering a terrible head injury, he was released from the hospital with lost memories and a disfiguring scar. Now, back in America, he makes his way home to Georgia with the help of a fellow veteran and a young war widow. But as his health continues to decline, what home will be left for him?

First published in 1926, William Faulkner’s debut novel explores the horrors of World War I, the interior lives of veterans, and the fickle nature of small-town American life. It “tells an old story—as old as the Greeks—and older—as old as war and its folly” (The New York Times).

About the author

William Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American Southern literature, and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature made him the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Also on the list were Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932).