Absalom, Absalom! was published by Random House, New York, on 26 October 1936, in a first printing of approximately 6,000 copies priced at $2.50. Faulkner considered it his masterpiece — and many critics agree. The novel is his most sustained formal experiment: a story told and retold by multiple narrators across multiple time periods, each version contradicting, supplementing, and layering upon the others until the reader is drawn into the act of historical reconstruction itself. It is a novel about the making of narrative as much as it is about the fall of a Southern dynasty.
The Novel
The central story — insofar as one can be isolated from the encrustations of telling — concerns Thomas Sutpen, who appears in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1833 with a band of Haitian slaves and a “design” to establish a plantation dynasty. He builds Sutpen’s Hundred, marries Ellen Coldfield, fathers two children (Henry and Judith), and appears to have achieved his design — until the past he has suppressed returns to destroy everything. His first wife, whom he repudiated in Haiti because she had black blood, has borne him a son named Charles Bon, who appears at the University of Mississippi and befriends Henry. Charles courts Judith. Henry learns that Charles is their half-brother — and, crucially, that he has African ancestry. At the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred in 1865, Henry shoots Charles dead.
This story is never told straight. It emerges through the voices of Rosa Coldfield (Sutpen’s sister-in-law, an embittered spinster), Mr. Compson (Quentin’s father, an ironist), Quentin Compson (obsessed with the South’s past), and Shreve McCannon (Quentin’s Canadian roommate at Harvard, who reconstructs the story with the detachment of an outsider). Each narrator invents, suppresses, and reimagines — and the reader is left to assemble truth from overlapping, contradictory versions.
The prose is Faulkner at his most demanding: sentences that run for pages, subordinate clauses nesting within subordinate clauses, chronology folding and refolding upon itself. The effect is not obscurity but density — a linguistic equivalent of the layered, haunted, unresolvable past that the novel describes.
Themes
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s most profound meditation on the South’s original sin — the twin crimes of slavery and miscegenation that poison every relationship across the colour line. Sutpen’s “design” fails not because of personal weakness but because it is built on a racial logic that cannot coexist with human feeling. The novel’s great question — why does Henry Sutpen kill Charles Bon? — has two possible answers: because Charles is his brother, or because Charles has black blood. The novel insists that it is the second, and that this insistence is the tragedy.
The title comes from 2 Samuel 18:33 — David’s lament for his rebel son Absalom. Sutpen, like David, builds a kingdom and destroys it through the rejection of his own children. The biblical parallel extends throughout: the novel is structured as a fall narrative, a meditation on the doom that attends the founding of dynasties upon injustice.
Collecting Absalom, Absalom!
First edition (1936, Random House): Approximately 6,000 copies, priced at $2.50.
Identification points:
- “First Printing” stated on the copyright page
- Random House colophon on the title page
- Red and black cloth boards
- Map of Yoknapatawpha County on the endpapers (drawn by Faulkner)
- Top edge stained red
First edition, first printing:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $20,000–$50,000
- Near Fine in jacket: $10,000–$20,000
- Without jacket: $1,000–$3,000
The dust jacket is cream/tan with red and black text. Faulkner’s map of Yoknapatawpha County — declaring himself “Sole Owner & Proprietor” — appears on the rear endpapers. The jacket is scarce and fragile.
Limited edition: Random House also issued a signed, limited edition of 300 copies, numbered and signed by Faulkner, in a slipcase. These bring $15,000–$40,000 depending on condition.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 2× for fine trade copies in jacket. The limited signed edition has appreciated more sharply — approximately 2.5×.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Faulkner’s best novel? Many scholars consider it his masterpiece — the fullest expression of his themes, the most ambitious formal structure, and the most sustained prose achievement. Others prefer the concentrated intensity of The Sound and the Fury.
Do I need to read other Faulkner novels first? Quentin Compson appears in The Sound and the Fury (where he commits suicide in June 1910). Absalom is set earlier in time (Quentin’s narration takes place in January 1910). Knowledge of Quentin’s fate enriches the reading but is not essential.
What is Yoknapatawpha County? Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi county, based on Lafayette County (where Oxford, Mississippi — Faulkner’s home — is located). Most of his major novels and stories are set there. The map in Absalom, Absalom! was the first published mapping of the county.