William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

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 1936

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Absalom, Absalom! is the ninth of William Faulkner’s nineteen novels and the sixth of the fourteen novels that he set in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the town and county he created in his fiction. Written over a period of three years, from 1934-1936, it took the second-longest of any of his novels to write and is a complex experiment in conflicting first-person narratives within a third-person framework.

The novel, which Faulkner initially called “Dark House”, had its genesis in two short stories. The first, “Evangeline”, a ghost story written probably in early 1931, was not published until it appeared in The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (1979). It contains almost the …

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3854 words

Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "Absalom, Absalom!". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 March 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6865, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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