William Faulkn­er wrote his sev­enth nov­el As I Lay Dying in the last months of 1929, almost imme­di­ate­ly after anoth­er stream-of-con­scious­ness mas­ter­piece, The Sound and the Fury. Like the Shake­speare­an title of that work, As I Lay Dying’s title, which comes from Homer’s Odyssey, indi­cates the lit­er­ary ambi­tions of its author. Only thir­ty-two at the time of its writ­ing, Faulkn­er com­posed the nov­el in eight weeks (six by his account­ing) while work­ing nights at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mississippi’s pow­er plant, decid­ing in advance that he would stake his entire rep­u­ta­tion as a writer on the book: “Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words, I knew what the last word would be… Before I began I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I nev­er touch ink again.” His pas­sion­ate con­vic­tion is evi­dent in the orig­i­nal manuscript—the first and only draft—which reveals “an ease in cre­ation unlike his oth­er nov­els.”

Per­haps the most nar­ra­tive­ly straight­for­ward of William Faulkner’s Yok­na­p­ataw­pha novels—set in a fic­tion­al Mis­sis­sip­pi region based on his own home coun­ty of Lafayette— As I Lay Dying tells the sto­ry of the Bun­drens, a poor white fam­i­ly on a per­ilous jour­ney to hon­or their matri­arch Addie’s request for a bur­ial in the town of Jef­fer­son. Despite the seem­ing sim­plic­i­ty of its plot, the book’s style is incred­i­bly com­plex, told from the per­spec­tive of fif­teen dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters in rough-hewn coun­try dialect and arrest­ing lyri­cal fugues. It is the novel’s “coarse lan­guage and dialect,” that is “exact­ly Faulkner’s project,” writes Tin House edi­tor Rob Spill­man: “Faulkn­er, a Mis­sis­sip­pi high school dropout, made it his mis­sion to cap­ture the emo­tion­al lives of the rur­al poor, unflinch­ing­ly writ­ing about race, gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty, and pow­er.” Through the pow­er of his lan­guage and—in the words of Robert Penn Warren—the “range of effect, philo­soph­i­cal weight, orig­i­nal­i­ty of style, vari­ety of char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, humor, and trag­ic inten­si­ty,” the South­ern nov­el­ist ele­vat­ed his hum­ble sub­jects to tru­ly myth­ic sta­tus.

Thanks to Harper­Collins, you can lis­ten to Faulkn­er him­self read from his mas­ter­piece: .au file (4.4 Mb), .gsm file (0.9 Mb), .ra file (0.5 Mb). You’ll have to lis­ten care­ful­ly to hear the author’s soft south­ern drawl, which gets lost at times in the poor qual­i­ty record­ing. As you do, fol­low along with the text in Google Books. Faulkn­er reads from the twelfth chap­ter, told by Darl, Addie’s sec­ond old­est son, a sen­si­tive, poet­ic thinker who nar­rates nine­teen of the novel’s 59 chap­ters (and who James Fran­co plays in his film adap­ta­tion of the book). In this pas­sage, Darl observes his mother’s death, and each fam­i­ly member’s imme­di­ate reac­tion, from sis­ter Dewey Dell’s dra­mat­ic expres­sions of grief, to old­er broth­er Cash’s tac­i­turn response and father Anse’s trag­ic-com­ic insen­si­tiv­i­ty: “God’s will be done…. Now I can get them teeth.”

To hear much more of Faulkner’s voice, vis­it Faulkn­er at Vir­ginia: An Audio Archive, which cat­a­logs and stores dig­i­tal audio of the author’s lec­tures, read­ings, and ques­tion and answer ses­sions dur­ing his tenure as writer in res­i­dence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia in 1957–58. In one par­tic­u­lar ses­sion with a group of engi­neer­ing school stu­dents, Faulkn­er gives us a clue for how we might approach his work, which can seem so strange to those unfa­mil­iar with the his­to­ry, cus­toms, and speech pat­terns of the Amer­i­can Deep South. Each of us, he says, “reads into the—the books, things the writer did­n’t put in there, in the terms that—that his and the writer’s expe­ri­ence could not pos­si­bly be iden­ti­cal. That there are things the writer might think is in that book, which the read­er does­n’t find for the same rea­son that—that no two expe­ri­ences can be iden­ti­cal, but every­one reads accord­ing to—to his own—own lights, his own expe­ri­ence, his own obser­va­tion, imag­i­na­tion, and expe­ri­ence.” For all of their provin­cial pecu­liar­i­ties, the Bundren’s epic strug­gle with the grief and pain of loss has uni­ver­sal reach and res­o­nance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkn­er Names His Best Nov­el, And the First Faulkn­er Nov­el You Should Read

William Faulkn­er Reads His Nobel Prize Speech

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Pub­lished in 1959, Williams S. Bur­roughs’ Naked Lunch ranks with oth­er mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry books like Hen­ry Miller’s Trop­ic of Can­cer and the works of Jean Genet as lit­er­a­ture that sharply divid­ed both crit­i­cal and legal opin­ion in argu­ments over style and in ques­tions of obscen­i­ty. Among its dis­turb­ing and sub­ver­sive char­ac­ters is the socio­path­ic sur­geon Dr. Ben­way, who inspired the med­ical hor­rors of J.G. Bal­lard and was inspired in turn by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Ben­way pro­vides some of the more satir­i­cal moments in the book, as you can hear in the sec­tion below, which Bur­roughs reads straight with his dis­tinc­tive nasal­ly Mid­west­ern twang. A short film of the scene (sad­ly unem­bed­d­a­ble), called “Dr. Ben­way Oper­ates,” has Bur­roughs him­self play­ing the doc­tor, in a drama­ti­za­tion that looks like low rent farce as direct­ed by John Waters.

A series of loose­ly con­nect­ed chap­ters that Bur­roughs said could be read in any order, Naked Lunch seems both fas­ci­nat­ed and repelled by the gris­ly med­ical­ized vio­lence in scenes like those above (one vignette, for exam­ple, presents “a tract against cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment”). This ambiva­lence was not lost on writ­ers like Nor­man Mail­er. The high­est praise of the nov­el prob­a­bly came from Mail­er dur­ing the novel’s 1966 obscen­i­ty tri­al before the Mass­a­chu­setts Supreme Court. In one among a hand­ful of lit­er­ary depo­si­tions, includ­ing one from Allen Gins­berg, Mail­er described Bur­roughs’ “extra­or­di­nary style,” and “exquis­ite poet­ic sense.” Despite the fact that its images were “often dis­gust­ing,” Mail­er called the book “a deep work, a cal­cu­lat­ed work” that “cap­tures that speech [‘gut­ter talk’] like no Amer­i­can writer I know.”

Per­haps one of the work’s most damn­ing pieces of crit­i­cism comes from the Judi­cial Offi­cer for the U.S. Postal Ser­vice, who called for the book’s ban­ning, apprais­ing the writ­ing as “undis­ci­plined prose, far more akin to the ear­ly work of exper­i­men­tal ado­les­cents than to any­thing of lit­er­ary mer­it.” Mail­er, Gins­berg, and the book’s oth­er sup­port­ers won out, a fact beat essay­ist Jed Birm­ing­ham laments, for a sur­pris­ing rea­son: The unban­ning of Naked Lunch led to the book’s tam­ing, its gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, as it were: “The wild, exu­ber­ant offen­sive­ness of the nov­el fades,” he writes, “in the face of all the legal argu­ments and the process of can­on­iza­tion.” In fact, the full nov­el may nev­er have been pub­lished at all had it not been for the Post Office in Chica­go seiz­ing sev­er­al hun­dred copies of The Chica­go Review, which con­tained some few Naked Lunch sec­tions. Hear­ing of the con­tro­ver­sy, French pub­lish­er Mau­rice Giro­dias hasti­ly threw togeth­er a man­u­script of the first 1959 text.

And yet, pri­or to the mid-six­ties, the deci­sion to ban Naked Lunch, “even before it was pub­lished in book form,” meant “that ques­tions of obscen­i­ty and cen­sor­ship dic­tat­ed the aca­d­e­m­ic and pub­lic recep­tion” of the book. Bur­roughs  com­ment­ed on the effects of such censorship—using an anal­o­gy to “the junk virus”—in part of a new pref­ace to the 50th edi­tion called “After­thoughts on a Depo­si­tion.” The heath risks of opi­ates “in con­trolled dos­es,” he writes,“maybe be min­i­mal,” yet the effects of crim­i­nal­iza­tion are out­sized “anti-drug hys­te­ria,” which “pos­es a threat to per­son­al free­doms and due-process pro­tec­tions of the law every­where.”

Since the novel’s vin­di­ca­tion, crit­i­cal con­sen­sus has cen­tered around sober, rev­er­ent judg­ments like Mailer’s—and to some less­er extent Ginsberg’s terse, irri­ta­ble tes­ti­mo­ny. While there are still those who despise the book, it’s sig­nif­i­cant that Bur­roughs’ work—which the Wash­ing­ton Post called the first of his “homo­sex­u­al planet-operas”—has achieved such wide­spread admi­ra­tion amidst the noto­ri­ety. The nov­el deals in themes we’re still adju­di­cat­ing dai­ly in courts legal and pub­lic some 55 years lat­er, point­ing per­haps to the con­tin­ued gulf between the thoughts and aims of the read­ing pub­lic and those of hys­ter­i­cal author­i­tar­i­ans and “the media and nar­cotics offi­cials,” as Bur­roughs has it. After all, at its 50th anniver­sary in 2009, Naked Lunch was pro­nounced “still fresh” by such main­stream out­lets as NPR and The Guardian, evi­dence of its per­sis­tent pow­er, and maybe also of its domes­ti­ca­tion.

Clips of Bur­roughs read­ing Naked Lunch can also be found on this Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Reads His First Nov­el, Junky

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

550 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness