Novels 1957-1962

Beschrijving van de uitgever

William Faulkner's fictional chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County draws to a close in this Library of America edition of his last three novels, rich with the accumulated history and lore of the microcosmic domain where he set most of his fiction. Faulkner wanted to use the time remaining to him to achieve a summing-up of his literary world: "I know I won't live long enough to write all I need to write about my imaginary country and county," he wrote to a friend, "so I must not waste what I have left."

The Town (1957) is the second novel in the Snopes trilogy that began with The Hamlet (included in Novels 1936–1940). Here the rise of the rapacious Flem Snopes and his extravagantly extended family, as they connive their way into power in the county seat of Jefferson, is brilliantly filtered through three separate narrative voices. Faulkner was particularly proud of the women characters—the doomed Eula and her daughter Linda—who stand at the novel's center.

Flem's relentless drive toward wealth and control plays itself out in The Mansion (1959), in which a wronged relative, the downtrodden sharecropper Mink Snopes, succeeds in avenging himself and bringing down the corrupt Snopes dynasty. In this last part of the trilogy, Faulkner brings in elements from many earlier novels as if to round out his fictional enterprise.

His last novel, The Reivers: A Reminiscence (1962), is mellower and more elegiac than his earlier work. A picaresque adventure set early in the twentieth century and involving a Memphis brothel, a racehorse, and a stolen automobile, it evokes the world of childhood with a final burst of comic energy.