A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily is a short story by the American writer William Faulkner, first published in April 1930 in Forum magazine, his first short story to appear in a major national publication and one of the earliest works set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Narrated collectively by the townspeople of Jefferson, Mississippi, using a non-chronological structure that moves back and forth across several decades, the story traces the reclusive later life of Emily Grierson, the last member of a once-prominent but declining aristocratic Southern family, from her father's controlling domination of her youth through her town's fascinated, gossiping speculation about her courtship, after his death, with Homer Barron, a Northern day laborer considered beneath her station. When Homer disappears after seeming poised to abandon Emily rather than marry her, and Emily herself grows ever more isolated, refusing to acknowledge her father's death or pay her taxes and enduring a mysterious foul smell from her house that the town discreetly resolves by spreading lime around the property, the story withholds its full meaning until Emily's own death decades later, when townspeople breaking into a long-sealed upstairs room find Homer's decayed skeleton in the bed and, on the pillow beside the indentation of a second head, a single strand of Emily's iron-gray hair, revealing that she had poisoned him and continued sleeping beside his corpse for years. Widely read as an allegory for the American South's own inability to relinquish its dead past, the story is among the most frequently anthologized and taught works of twentieth-century American short fiction.