Flags in the Dust: The complete text of Faulkner's third novel, which appeared in a cut version as Sartoris

The complete text of Faulkner's third novel, published for the first time in 1973, appeared with his reluctant consent in a much cut version in 1929 as SARTORIS. From the 1974 paperback cover blurb: The complete text, published for the first time in 1973, of Faulkner's third novel, written when he was twenty-nine, which appeared, with his reluctant consent, in a much cut version in 1929 as Sartoris. "In either version, Sartoris or Flags in the Dust is an outstanding work...The shorter version, in effect, ‘tidies up' Faulkner's erratic prose. But Faulkner was about as impossible to tidy up, to civilize, as was Huck Finn—and Flags in the Dust, consequently, is a better book than Sartoris.”—Philip Corwin, National Observer "A rich and rewarding reading experience...the first of Faulkner's mature fiction."—Panthea Broughton, Saturday Review "A marvellously intense, highly overwritten, deeply felt exploration by a young writer of the themes of chivalry, race, death and survival."—Business Week In 1919, young Bayard Sartoris returns to Yoknapatawpha from the war. But unlike his heroic Civil War great grandfather and great uncle, Sartoris' war experiences leave him aimless and bitter, a walking casualty of how the lost ideals and abiding memory of the ante-bellum South have crippled the present