Sartoris

Sartoris, novel by William Faulkner, published in 1929 as a shortened version of a novel that was eventually published in its entirety in 1973 under the original title Flags in the Dust.

Disproportionate and sometimes emotionally overwrought, Faulkner’s third novel was the last of his apprentice works but also the first set in his imagined community of Yoknapatawpha county, Mississippi. The novel concerns the Sartoris family, which revels in a mythical history of clan heroism and nobility that is belied by their current desperation and recklessness. The work addresses many of the themes Faulkner developed at length in his later novels: innate brutality, racial tension, and the contrast between a romanticized Southern past and a tawdry present. It also introduces characters who featured prominently in his other Yoknapatawpha novels, including the crass Snopes family and lawyer Horace Benbow. The early history of the Sartoris family is told in The Unvanquished (1938).