A Rose for Emily

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Sound and the Fury, a Southern gothic classic about a small-town spinster’s disturbing hidden life.

A literary classic from one of the twentieth century’s greatest American writers, A Rose for Emily is William Faulkner at his finest. The community of the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, has come together for the funeral of longtime resident Emily Grierson, an eccentric recluse and one of the last antebellum Southern aristocrats. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn the tragedy of Emily’s life—the father who kept her from marrying and the northerner who claimed her heart before mysteriously disappearing. The world moves on while Emily’s life remains seemingly unchanged. It’s only after Emily is laid to rest that the townsfolk learn her horrifying secrets . . .

“The greatest artist the South has produced.” —Ralph Ellison

“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there.” —Eudora Welty