William Faulkner (1897–1962) is the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, among other works. These two novels were originally published by Liveright in the 1920s. Melanie Benson Taylor is Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. She is Executive Editor of Native South. She is author of The Indian in American Southern Literature, Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause, and Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1919-2002. Her edited volumes include The Cambridge Companion to the Native American Novel, The Cambridge History of Native American Literature, and, with Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny, I Am Where I Come From: Native American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories.

"The Norton Critical Edition of Light in August appears at a key juncture, and Melanie Benson Taylor’s editorship points this up keenly. The novel and the scholarship included here attest to the centrality of race in Yoknapatawpha, a fact well-known in the Faulkner community, yet wider understanding of which this volume will ensure. Benson Taylor has done more than skillfully edit a compendium. She has made a volume that is essential to ongoing efforts to teach and write about the increasingly race-conscious writer Faulkner became following The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying in the mid-1930s and beyond."