Soldiers’ Pay

William Faulkner’s first novel is one of the most compelling works of American fiction to emerge from the First World War.

A wounded veteran’s homecoming is at the center of Faulkner’s first novel. Badly scarred in body and mind, and unable to remember much, Donald Mahon is brought home at the end of the World War I by a fellow soldier and a young war widow they befriend on the train. Mahon’s arrival is a shock to his hometown, however, for he had long since been reported dead. His flighty young fiancee is caught between her revulsion at his condition and her sense of duty, while Mahon’s father greets his unexpected survival first with joy and then with a determined denial of what his grievous injuries mean. As events unfold, alliances are formed and broken, sacrifices are made, and Faulkner deftly invests his heartbreaking tale with some of the deeper themes that would come to mark his later masterpieces.