Faulkner said that he wrote the book as a cheap idea to make money. Nobody was buying the books he had previously published, he needed the money. So, in 1929, he wrote this book in about three weeks, a horrific believable story. His publisher told him they would both go to jail because of it.
The book was published in 1931 and in 1932 Faulkner added the Introduction to the otherwise unaltered first edition. This 1932 edition was published by the Modern Library.