Soldiers' Pay Author:William Faulkner SOLDIERS' PAY, Faulkner's first novel, is about World War I and its aftermath, and draws on his own experiences. The novel's main character is Lieutenant Donald Mahon, a fighter pilot shot down in Europe and believed dead. He turns up, however, on a train bound for his hometown, Charlestown, Georgia, but he has suffered a terrible, d... more »isfiguring head wound, and his memory is gone. On the train he meets Joe Gilligan, an Army private, and Margaret Powers, a war widow, who accompany him back to Charlestown to care for him. The novel recounts Donald's reunion with his father and with his fiancee, who assumed he was dead, and traces his slow degradation and decline into death.« less