This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1985 corrected text and is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. "Backgrounds and Contexts" is divided into three sections, each of which includes a concise introduction by Michael Gorra that carefully frames the issues presented, with particular attention to As I Lay Dying\047s place in Faulkner\047s literary life. "Contemporary Reception" reprints American, English, and French reviews by Clifton Fadiman, Henry Nash Smith, Edwin Muir, and Maurice Coindreau, among others, along with Valery Larbaud\047s never-before-translated preface to the first French edition of the novel. "The Writer and His Work" examines Faulkner\047s claim to have written the novel in six weeks without changing a word. It includes his comments on the book\047s composition along with his later thoughts on and changing opinions of it, sample pages from the manuscript, his Nobel Prize address, and the little-known short story in which he first used the title. "Cultural Context" reprints an essay by Carson McCullers and an excerpt from James Agee\047s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men along with other materials that address questions of Southern Agrarianism and the Southern grotesque. "Criticism" begins with the editor\047s introduction to As I Lay Dying\047s critical history and scholarly reception. Eleven major essays are provided by Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Calvin Bedient, Andre Bleikasten, Eric Sundquist, Stephen M. Ross, Doreen Fowler, Patrick O\047Donnell, Richard Gray, John Limon, and Donald M. Kartiganer. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are also included.