Word: mississippi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. I created a cosmos of my own." He called it Yoknapatawpha County and set it down in the rolling pine hills and cotton-rich valley bottoms of northeastern Mississippi, 80 miles from Memphis, Tenn., named its county seat Jefferson, and peopled its 2,400 sq. mi. with 15,611 residents-"Whites, 6,298; Negroes, 9,313. William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor...
...from wrong and shame, descended to him." Roth decrees that Henry must sleep on a pallet on the floor. This primal wrong and first denial of equality leaves Roth in "a rigid fury of the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit." Just how far Mississippi's troubles extend back into history is examined in Absalom, Absalom! That history is inexorably racial. The novel mercilessly strips away the romantic Southern mythology to reveal the brutal repression of slavery, the arrogance of plantation owners who could summon Negro girls to their beds as if they were...
...panting, difficult prose, the several 20th century narrators of Absalom, Absalom! pursue the story of Thomas Sutpen, who came to Mississippi with wagonloads of savage blacks in 1832 determined to change a lOO-sq.-mi. piece of virgin forest into a plantation. Sutpen is a creature of high-flown words and naked will-and perhaps the closest to a tragic hero in the classical Greek sense that U.S. literature has produced...
...your brother?" This, Faulkner seems to say, lies at the heart of the almost paranoiac fear of the "mixing of bloods," which would call in question the belief in a difference between the races on which white dominance was founded, and which, as the owner of one of Mississippi's largest plantations said last week, is still "very real for many whites today...
...walked off the page. Throughout the South today, "Snopes" is a derisive epithet for men ranging from leading demagogic politicians down to the Klansman next door. Snopeses pop up early in Yoknapatawpha County, but unlike most other Faulkner characters they seem to have no ancestors-at least not from Mississippi. Flem's father, the vicious Ab Snopes, wore neither blue uniform nor grey, but was a carrion crow on Civil War battlefields...