Absalom, Absalom!

FAULKNER, William.

Item Number: 100864

New York: The Modern Library, 1951.

First Modern Library edition of “the greatest American novel since the turn of the century.” Octavo, original cloth, pictorial endpapers. Name to the front free endpaper, near fine in a very good dust jacket. Introduction by Harvey Breit.

Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.” "Absalom is the peak of Faulkner's fictional achievement. It is unquestionably the greatest American novel since the turn of the century… Its sole competitors among contemporary American novels are Dreiser's American Tragedy and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, neither of which approaches Faulkner's innovative daring" (Karl, 582).