Light in August
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First published on 6 October 1932, Light in August brings together the lives of several strangers in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, where the heat of summer seems to draw buried histories into the open. Lena Grove, young, pregnant and resolute, is walking across the South in search of the man who promised to marry her; her journey crosses the troubled paths of Joe Christmas, a man haunted by uncertainty about his origins, and Reverend Gail Hightower, whose life has been undone by the past. As their stories converge, Faulkner explores a community shaped by racial prejudice, religious fanaticism and the uneasy inheritance of Southern history.
Among Faulkner’s most powerful novels, Light in August combines the breadth of a social panorama with the intensity of intimate psychological portraits. Its interwoven narratives examine identity, isolation, belonging and the human need for grace, while its shifting chronology and richly textured prose reveal the violence and tenderness beneath ordinary lives. Both a defining work of Southern Gothic and a major achievement of American Modernism, it is a novel of extraordinary moral complexity, in which the search for who we are becomes inseparable from the stories others tell about us.
From the book
“A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage.”
— William Faulkner, Light in August
On Light in August
“There could hardly be a more characteristically American novel.”
— James D. Hart, The Oxford Companion to American Literature