William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

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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. 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 conflicting first-person narratives within a third-person framework.

The novel, which Faulkner initially called “Dark House”, had its genesis in two short stories. The first, “Evangeline”, a ghost story written probably in early 1931, was not published until it appeared in The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (1979). It contains almost the entire outline of the story that Faulkner later developed into the novel. The

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Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "Absalom, Absalom!". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 March 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6865, accessed 25 November 2024.]

6865 Absalom, Absalom! 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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