Absalom, Absalom!

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."

Ralph Ellison

For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must return to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics --Ralph Ellison

The only place you can find Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, is in the Nobel Prize-winning fiction of William Faulkner. The imagined lives of its residents form an exploration of suffering, love and family that has been acknowledged as one of the great literary achievements of the 20th century. Along the way, Faulkner set a tone for Southern literature that influences writers decades later.