Absalom, Absalom! is the ninth of William Faulkner’s nineteen novels and the sixth of the fourteen novels that he set in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the town and county he created in his fiction. Published on 26 October 1936, it was the first of his books to be published by Random House (Blotner, 376). Written over a period of three years, from 1934-1936, it took the second-longest of any of his novels to write and is a complex experiment in competing first-person narratives within a third-person framework. Baffling to many readers at the time, the novel has since “been . . . described as the most serious attempt by any white writer to confront the problem of race in America” (Sullivan, 47).
The novel had its genesis in two short stories. The first, “Evangeline”, a...
4658 words
Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "Absalom, Absalom!". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 March 2006; last revised 19 May 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6865, accessed 10 June 2026.]
