Wild Palms

In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other.

In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman.

From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit.

The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own. 

Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Vintage International
Page Count: 304pp
Size: 5.25 x 8
Notes: paperback
Date of Publication: October 31, 1995
ISBN: 978-0679741930