William Faulkner: Novels 1957-1962: The Town / The Mansion / The Reivers (Library of America)

About this book

William Faulkners fictional chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County culminates in his three last novels rich with the accumulated history and lore of the microcosmic domain where he set most of his work. Faulkner wanted to use the time remaining to him to achieve a summing-up of his fictional world: I know I wont live long enough to write all I need to write about my imaginary country and county he wrote to a friend so I must not waste what I have left. The Town (1957) is the second novel in the Snopes trilogy that began with The Hamlet (collected in a previous Library of America volume). Here the rise of the rapacious Flem Snopes and his extravagantly extended family as they connive their way into power in the county seat of Jeffersonevery Snopes in Frenchmans Bend moving up one step leaving that last slot at the bottom open for the next Snopes to appear from nowhere and fillis brilliantly filtered through three separate narrative voices. Faulkner was particularly proud of the women charactersthe doomed Eula and her daughter Lindawho stand at the novels center. Flems relentless drive toward wealth and control plays itself out in The Mansion (1959) in which a wronged relative the downtrodden sharecropper Mink Snopes succeeds in avenging himself and bringing down the corrupt Snopes dynasty. In this last part of the trilogy Faulkner brings in elements from many earlier novels to round out his fictional enterprise. His last novel The Reivers: A Reminiscence (1962) is distinctly mellower and more elegiac than his earlier work. A picaresque adventure set early in the twentieth century and involving a Memphis brothel a racehorse and a stolen automobile it evokes the world of childhood with a final burst of comic energy. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing and keeping permanently in print Americas best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date authoritative editions that average 1 000 pages in length feature cloth covers sewn bindings and ribbon markers and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.