Sartoris.

FAULKNER, William.

$3,800.00

Item Number: 95802

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.

First edition of Faulkner’s work set in Yoknapatawpha County, and introduces many of the characters that appear in his later fiction. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco chemise and clamshell box. A very nice example.

Sartoris portrays the decay of the Mississippi aristocracy following the social upheaval of the American Civil War. The 1929 edition is an abridged version of Faulkner's original work. The full text was published in 1973 as Flags in the Dust. Faulkner's great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, himself a colonel in the American Civil War, served as the model for Colonel John Sartoris. Faulkner also fashioned other characters in the book on local people from his hometown Oxford. Literary critic Cleanth Brooks described the novel as "extremely well-written", full of literary allusions and exploring the plight of a lost generation. He compared Sartoris to the poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.