Books by Jack L. Capps

William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING was published in 1930, exactly a year after THE SOUND AND THE FURY. A stream-of-consciousness novel narrated from 15 different points of view, AS I LAY DYING opens as the Bundren matriarch, Addie, is dying at the family home in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. (His later novel ABSALOM, ABSALOM includes a map of the place.) The novel chronicles the struggle of this clan of poor whites--Addie's husband, Anse, and their extended family--to travel to Jefferson, the county seat, to bury Addie, at her request, in the town she came from. Their hapless nine-day journey includes a flooded river, drowned mules, a broken leg, impatient buzzards circling the body, and a fire in a barn where they take refuge. Faulkner's bleakly comic novel, which explores the nature of grief, community, and family, is considered one of his masterpieces.

William Faulkner's 1932 novel, LIGHT IN AUGUST, takes place in the first two decades of the 20th century. Its characters are mostly marginal outcasts, but most of the story concerns Joe Christmas, an orphaned man with a mysterious past who believes himself to be part black and is, accordingly, shunned--until he meets a tragic and gruesome end at the hands of the aptly named Percy Grimm, a driven and obsessive bigot who embodies the worst of his society. Faulkner originally titled this powerful novel DARK HOUSE, but after a chance remark from his wife he went into his study, crossed out that title, and replaced it with LIGHT IN AUGUST. Like so many of Faulkner's novels from this period onward, this one deals with the difficulties of transcending race and gender in the American South.