Back Novels 1957–1962

William Faulkner: Novels 1957–1962

The Town | The Mansion | The Reivers: A Reminiscence

Edited by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk

“The Town and The Mansion contain some of Faulkner’s most robust humor…. The Reivers was the final book of a physically and emotionally wasted writer. But it has a clear virtue: … the novel is a less layered introduction to a superb storyteller…. With The Reivers as a sip, a reader before unacquainted with Faulkner may find it hard to resist drinking deeper.”— The Washington Times

Overview

Overview

News Remembering Faulkner scholar Noel Polk (1943–2012)
November 17, 2017

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William Faulkner’s 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 won’t 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 Jefferson—“every Snopes in Frenchman’s Bend moving up one step, leaving that last slot at the bottom open for the next Snopes to appear from nowhere and fill”—is brilliantly filtered through three separate narrative voices. Faulkner was particularly proud of the women characters—the doomed Eula and her daughter Linda—who stand at the novel’s center.

Flem’s 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.

Like the other four volumes in The Library of America edition of the complete novels of William Faulkner, Novels 1957–1962 was newly edited by textual scholar Noel Polk (1943–2012) to establish an authoritative text in accordance with the author’s intentions. Faulkner’s esteemed biographer Joseph Blotner (1923–2012) wrote the volume’s chronology and explanatory notes.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-88301169-7 1020 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 112 Library of America Series

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William Faulkner: Novels 1957–1962

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