Composition, Publishing History, Background

The Town (New York: Random House), published 1 May 1957, is the second volume of William Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, which also includes The Hamlet (1940) and The Mansion (1959). The seventeenth of his nineteen novels, The Town is the twelfth of fourteen that he set primarily in his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

Faulkner’s Snopes saga, “about the rise of poor whites and rednecks in social, political, and economic competition with the old southern aristocracy”, began with oral tales “swapped back and forth between Faulkner and his friend, Phil Stone, an Oxford, Mississippi, …

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Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "The Town". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 September 2022 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7954, accessed 21 November 2024.]

7954 The Town 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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