The Hamlet (New York: Random House, 1940), published 1 April 1940 (Blotner and Polk, 1113), was William Faulkner’s twelfth novel, his eighth about Yoknapatawpha (the apocryphal Mississippi county he created in his fiction), and is the first volume of his Snopes trilogy. It had its origins in the 1920s in humorous tales swapped back and forth between Faulkner and his friend, Phil Stone (Meriwether, [5]), an Oxford, Mississippi, attorney, about the rise of poor whites and rednecks in social, political, and economic competition with the old southern aristocracy (Meriwether, [4]). Stone, in fact, claimed to have invented the Snopeses (Meriwether, [4]), but it was Faulkner who immortalized them.
Composition and Publication History
Faulkner’s first attempt at a Snopes novel, Father Abraham, written about 1926 or 1927 (Meriwether, [3]), but not published in its original form...
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Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "The Hamlet". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 May 2009; last revised 31 October 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=658, accessed 10 June 2026.]
