num_pages: 392
description: Absalom! Absalom! is William Faulkner’s major work--his most important and ambitious contribution to American literature. In the dramatic texture of this story of the founding, flourishing and decay of the plantation of Sutpen's Hundred, and of the family that demonic Stephen Sutpen brought into the world a generation before the Civil War, there rises the lament of the South for its own vanished splendor. From its magnificent and bold inception, when with his wild Negroes the founder of the great plantation appeared out of nowhere to seize his hundred square miles of land and build his mansion, through the destruction of the Civil War and its aftermath, and the drab beginnings of the new South, the narrative is colored by the author’s glowing imagery, his command of a powerful and magical prose style. Beneath its brilliant surface and dark undercurrents, the novel sweeps backward and forward through time. The story in all its ramifications becomes crystallized in the mind of a relative of this strange family, young Quentin Compson, a Harvard student. At the terrifying and abrupt end of the tale there remain in the crumbling shell of the old house only the dying son of its builder, an ancient Negro woman who had been his slave, and the idiot mulatto youth who was to be the only direct descendant of the Sutpen blood.This edition is set from the first American edition of 1936 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House.
language: English
title: Absalom, Absalom!
titlecomplete: Absalom, Absalom!
characters: Henry Sutpen, Jason Compson III, Jim Bond, Charles Bon, Quentin Compson III, Shreve, Ellen Coldfield, Wash Jones, Thomas Sutpen, Rosa Coldfield, Judith Sutpen
genres: 20th Century, American, Historical Fiction, Southern, Literary Fiction, Novels, Southern Gothic, Literature, Classics, Fiction
ratings_count: 43564
places: Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, The United States of America
publisher: Random House