Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner · 1897–1962 · USA

Why it matters

Thomas Sutpen's design (a plantation dynasty willed out of nothing), reconstructed by narrators who weren't there, decades later, in a Harvard dorm. The South's original sin as epistemology: the great novel about how history is told.

At a glance

Nested, contradictory retellings and famously labyrinthine sentences make this Faulkner's hardest novel.