Absalom, Absalom!

By: William Faulkner

Narrated by: John Winston

Considered one of the greatest American writers from the South, William Faulkner is published 30 books in his lifetime, winning two Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel prize. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is a novel of the Civil War that tells the story of three families of the South. The main character, Thomas Sutpen, is a poor man who becomes wealthy and marries into a respectable family. However, his ambition brings about his death and the ruin of his family. The history of Sutpen mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture. Sutpen's failures necessarily reflect the weaknesses of an idealistic South. The narrative unfolds in a non-chronological order through various narrators, like Sutpen’s sister-in-law Rosa Coldfield and Quentin Compson, a character in Faulkner's earlier work The Sound and the Fury.

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