The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes -- wily, energetic, a man of shady origins -- quickly...

The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."

Bayard Sartoris returns from the battlefields of the Civil War and tries to build his family and his fortune.

Dramatizes the events that surround the murder of a white man in a volatile Southern community.

Collection of excerpts from longer works. For other editions, see Author Catalog.

These three full-length novels compose the Snopes trilogy. In "The Hamlet," the cunning Flem Snopes is introduced with other members of his conniving family. Flem's dream is to marry Eula Varner and remake the small world of Frenchman's Bend as his own personal kingdom. In "The Town," Flem sets his sights on the county seat of Yoknapatawpha County, Jefferson, in a ruthless bid for even more power. Finally, in "The Mansion," Mink Snopes brings down...

Contains forty-five of Faulkner's stories that were previously uncollected in the form in which they were first written.

Tells the stories of a mourning family remembering its past, a vicious gangster, a young pregnant woman searching for her child's father, and barnstorming pilots at an air show.

"How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, one of America's most preeminent literary critics. Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. Born in 1897 in Mississippi,...