Light in August

William Faulkner

Feb 2015 · iHelp Press

About this ebook

Light in August, set in Faulkner’s oft used Yoknapatawpha County, follows three separate yet connected storylines that focuses on race and violence in the deep South. The novel opens with a pregnant Lena Grove traveling the South on foot to find her baby’s father, a man she knows by the name of Lucas Burch but is actually named Joe Brown. Lena’s search leads her to a man named Byron Bunch, who everyone thinks she must mean, and Byron quickly becomes obsessed with Lena, wishes to marry her, and subsequently keeps her from the baby’s father. The second storyline focuses on Joe Christmas, a troubled man who is uncertain about his birth and believes himself to be half-black. He works at a local lumber mill but only in an attempt to disguise his illegal liquor business where he makes most of his money. He becomes partners with a man named Joe Brown. The third and final story to tie everything together is Gail Hightower, a local ex-minister after he became involved in scandal that forever tarnished his name.

The novel is richly written, exquisitely descriptive and oftentimes complex as it alternates being multiple individuals and also between their pasts and their present. Each separate story continues on its own path yet they are all skilfully and slowly intertwining leaving the reader oblivious to the obvious connections until the pieces finally come together at the end.

“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair.” 

About the author

The man himself never stood taller than five feet, six inches tall, but in the realm of American literature, William Faulkner is a giant. More than simply a renowned Mississippi writer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story writer is acclaimed throughout the world as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, one who transformed his “postage stamp” of native soil into an apocryphal setting in which he explored, articulated, and challenged “the old verities and truths of the heart.” During what is generally considered his period of greatest artistic achievement, from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to Go Down, Moses in 1942, Faulkner accomplished in a little over a decade more artistically than most writers accomplish over a lifetime of writing. It is one of the more remarkable feats of American literature, how a young man who never graduated from high school, never received a college degree, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, all the while balancing a growing family of dependents and impending financial ruin, could during the Great Depression write a series of novels all set in the same small Southern county — novels that include As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and above all, Absalom, Absalom! — that would one day be recognized as among the greatest novels ever written by an American.