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Overview
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner
Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
Synopsis
Published in 1932, Light in August is the seventh in the series of William Faulkner's novels set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The book tells the story of the orphan Joe Christmas, whose mixed black-white heritage condemns him to life as an outsider who is hated by some and pitied by others.
Simon McEachern, the puritanical farmer who rears Joe, frequently whips the boy, and Joe leaves home after savagely beating Simon. Joe then wanders for 15 years, eventually settling in with a white woman devoted to aiding blacks, Joanna Burden. But her evangelism is a reminder to Joe of Simon's; still damaged from his upbringing, Joe murders Joanna. Joe flees but a companion reveals his whereabouts and he is killed and castrated.
Donald Adams
With this new novel, Mr. Faulkner has taken a tremendous stride forward. . . . Light in August is a powerful novel, a book which secures Mr. Faulkner's place in the very front rank of American writers of fiction. -- Books of the Century; New York Times review, October 1932
Editorials
From the Publisher
“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there.” —Eudora Welty
“Faulkner’s greatness resided primarily in his power to transpose the American scene as it exists in the Southern states, filter it through his sensibilities and finally define it with words.” —Richard Wright