, published by Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith on 6 October 1930 (Blotner and Polk, 1022), is the fifth of William Faulkner’s nineteen novels, and the third of fourteen that he set in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the town and county he created in his fiction. The name of his apocryphal county first appeared in this novel.
Faulkner claimed, with only slight exaggeration, that he wrote the book in six weeks without changing a word (Faulkner, “Introduction,” vii). In reality, the manuscript and typescript contain numerous revisions, though relatively minor and few compared to his previous novels, and it took him nearly seven weeks, not six, to draft it, from late October to mid-December, 1929, and approximately another month, until mid-January, 1930, to
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Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "As I Lay Dying". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2007; last revised 19 May 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6524, accessed 02 July 2025.]
