NEW YORK — “Twixt Cup and Lip,” written soon after World War I and being published for the first time, is a one-act comedy in which a modern, freethinking woman finds herself courted by two men and changes her mind at the last moment.

Compared to other plays from the 1920s, “’Twixt Cup and Lip” was not uncommon with its matter-of-fact references to sex and drinking and the characters’ unending cigarettes. Even now, audiences might laugh at such lines as “Marriage is stylish again you know” and “I thought all men papered their room with actresses and fat girls in bathing suits.”

But the name of the playwright is the real attraction: William Faulkner.

Written when the future Nobel laureate was in his early 20s, “’Twixt Cup and Lip” was discovered in the University of Virginia archives by The Strand Magazine managing editor Andrew Gulli, who over the past few years has also tracked down long-lost and obscure works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and many others. The play appears in the Strand’s holiday issue, which went on sale Friday.

“Faulkner wrote this at a time of great change in society especially for women,” Gulli told The Associated Press recently.

“This work is unique in that it showed a side of Faulkner that was comical yet that at the same time explored the nascent theme of the independent jazz era female which F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker carried on further.”