If you just haven't had enough of these characters, you can find them in other Faulkner novels, such as The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Intruder in the Dust (1948). And who doesn't love a little intimacy with a Nobel Prize winner? That makes this a really intimate book to read. Our guy can barely distance himself from his own effort, as his character Shreve McCannon puts it, to ' Tell about the South' (6.1). When we read this story about a mysterious man named Sutpen and his messed-up nineteenth-century family, it's hardly surprising to learn that its author spent the majority of his life within forty miles of his birthplace in Oxford, Mississippi. And critics of modernist literature cite the book alongside James Joyce's Ulysses as one of the masterpieces of the period, in particular for its work with the then-popular stream-of-consciousness narrative style. In 2009, the magazine Oxford American voted Absalom, Absalom! the best Southern novel of all time (yep, it beat To Kill a Mockingbird – how about that!).

Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! was one of the main reasons Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in literature. But don't let that scare you off: after all, it's a pretty big deal.

William Faulkner's novel is so rich and complex that it can be tough to follow.

Shmoop thinks it should have been something more like this: Absalom, Absalom!?! This story has it all – multiple narrators, mysterious characters, shifts in time – and that's kind of the problem. The exclamation point in Absalom, Absalom!doesn't quite do it justice.

Absalom absalom by william faulkner