William Faulkner, The Hamlet

Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Ed. by Stephen E. Meats, Pittsburg State University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1940

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

What eventually became The Hamlet (New York: Random House, 1940), William Faulkner's twelfth novel, his eighth about Yoknapatawpha (the apocryphal Mississippi county he created in his fiction), and the first volume of his Snopes trilogy, had its origins in the 1920s in stories swapped back and forth between Faulkner and his friend, Phil Stone, an Oxford, Mississippi, attorney, about the rise of poor whites and rednecks in social, political, and economic competition with the old southern aristocracy. Stone, in fact, claimed to have invented the Snopeses, but it was Faulkner who immortalized them.

Faulkner's first attempt at a Snopes novel, “Father Abraham”, written about 1926 or 1927, but not published in its …

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3206 words

Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "The Hamlet". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 May 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=658, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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