Novels 1936–1940: Absalom, Absalom! / The Unvanquished / If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem / The Hamlet

By William Faulkner

Book Overview

The four novels in this Library of America collection show Faulkner at the height of his powers and fully demonstrate the range of his genius. They explore the tragic and comic aspects of a South haunted by its past and uncertain of its future.

In the intricate, spellbinding masterpiece Absalom, Absalom (1936), Quentin Compson descends into a vortex of images, voices, passions, and doomed desires as he and his Harvard roommate re-create the story of Thomas Sutpen and the insane ambitions, romantic hopes, and distortions of honor and conscience that trap Sutpen and those around him, until their grief and pride and fate become the inescapable and unbearable legacy of a past that is not dead and not even past.

In seven episodes, The Unvanquished (1938) recounts the ordeals and triumphs of the Sartoris family during and after the Civil War as seen through the maturing consciousness of young Bayard Sartoris. The indomitable Granny Millard, the honor-driven patriarch Colonel Sartoris, the quick-witted and inventive Ringo, the ferociously heroic Drusilla, and the scheming, mendacious Ab Snopes embody the inheritance that Bayard must reconcile with a new, but diminished, South.

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (published in 1939 as The Wild Palms) tells of desperate lovers fleeing convention and of a convict escaping the chaos of passion. In "The Wild Palms," an emotional and geographic odyssey ends in a Mississippi coastal town. In counterpoint, "Old Man" recounts the adventures of an inarticulate "tall convict" swept to freedom by a raging Mississippi flood, but who then fights to return to his simple prison life.

In The Hamlet (1940), the first book of the great Snopes family trilogy, the outrageous scheming energy of Flem Snopes and his relatives is vividly and hilariously juxtaposed with the fragile communal customs of Frenchman's Bend. Here are Ike Snopes, in love with a cow, the sexual adventures of Eula Varner Snopes, and the wild saturnalia of the spotted horses auction, a comic masterpiece.

The Library of America edition of Faulkner's work publishes for the first time new, corrected texts of The Unvanquished, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and The Hamlet. (The corrected text of Absalom, Absalom was published by Random House in 1986.) Manuscripts, typescripts, galleys, and published editions have been collated to produce versions that are faithful to Faulkner's intentions and free of the changes introduced by subsequent editors.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0940450550
• ISBN13: 9780940450554
• Release Date: June 1990
• Publisher: Library of America
• Length: 1148 Pages
• Weight: 1.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.1" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Good, Good

This novel is a good read for people who love good novels. `Absalom, Absalom!' in my opinion is the best story of all the stories in `William Faulkner: Novels 1936-1940' I would recommend this collection of Faulkner novels to anyone. What's not to like?

Absalom, Absalom!

Thomas Sutpen when he is fourteen years old knocks on the front door of a mansion and is told to go to the back door. He and his family are poor and just down from egalitarian mountains, the many class distinctions of southern plantation dynastic society stun him. Born of poor white stock in what later became West Virginia, as an adolescent he moved with his family to the Tidewater region of Virginia and for the first time saw wealthy planters. This formative experience at the age of fourteen led him to realize the social caste system of the antebellum South, and this experience led him to conceive his "design" to create a dynasty of wealth and power. "Out of quiet thunderclap," Faulkner writes of Sutpen's haunting presence in Miss Rosa's voice, "he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard" Sutpen with slaves and an architect "overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light". Sutpen appears upon the "soundless Nothing" of earth like some gnostic demiurge. Distorting the invocation "Be Light" from the book of Genesis, the description of Sutpen's construction on the land 12 miles outside Jefferson shows him calling his own empire into existence with the phrase "Be Sutpen's Hundred" like a demoted godling trying to rob the creator of franchise. During the war Sutpen's daughters Judith and Clytie along with Aunt Rosa form a cabal at Sutpen's Hundred like three nuns awaiting not Christ's return but Sutpen's. Judith repudiates Sutpen's design by taking in Bon's mulatto son who has yellow fever and dies nursing him. Faulkner has spun an intricate tapestry of polymathic prose. He experiments with characters becoming part of telling the story. The story is told from three views, Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson whos father knew Sutpen, and Quentin and Shreve who are college roomates and who tell and imagine parts of the story in their cold, cold room deep into one winter night, "the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve) shades too, quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath". Reading Absalom, Absalom! is like being lost in a maze turning corners and finding where you have been before but a little different, something added, growing dimensional jigsaw until you hit the exit panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark, saying I could go again like you have been on some phantasmagoric carnival ride.

Great Value on Faulkner

I agree with the previous review: Faulkner is an acquired taste. However, if you like his work and want to own some of his greatest novels without breaking the bank, this book fills the bill. It's a high-quality book. It's bound well, the paper stock is not flimsy and it holds up to reading after reading. I received mine as a graduation gift in 1997. Since then it's been read by me, some friends, family members and coworkers and it shows little wear. These are some of Faulkner's greatest works. To own them under one cover for this price? You won't find a better deal.

great deal

You probably either love Faulkner's work or you hate it. If you hate it I won't argue with you. There are good reasons why you might not like his work (talk about acquired tastes). If you love him then you can't really find a much better deal than this book. "Absalom, Absalom," "If I Forget Thee Oh Jerusalem," and "The Hamlet" are some of his best work and you can get this book, which is a nice little volume in about every way, for about 2/3 of what you'd pay to get them seperately as paperbacks. I'm not overly impressed by what I've read of "The Unvanquished," and scholars seem to share my opinion, but with works as good as the other three I think a little filler is okay.