Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

1994 Modern Library Edition

Copyright © 1994 by Random House, Inc.

Introduction copyright © 1994 by George Garrett

The Hamlet: Copyright 1931 and renewed 1958 by William Faulkner. Copyright 1932 and renewed 1959 by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright 1931, 1936, 1940 by Random House, Inc. Copyright renewed 1964 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers. Copyright © 1964 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers.

The Mansion: Copyright © 1955, 1959 by William Faulkner. Copyright renewed 1983 and 1987 by Jill Faulkner Summers.

The Town: Copyright © 1957 by William Faulkner. Copyright renewed 1985 by Jill Faulkner Summers. Copyright © 1957 by The Curtis Publishing Company.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Hamlet, The Mansion, and The Town were all originally published by Random House, Inc.

Portions of The Hamlet were previously published as short stories as follows: “Spotted Horses” and “Fool About a Horse” were published in Scribner’s Magazine; “The Hound” was published in Harper’s Magazine; “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard” was published in The Saturday Evening Post.

A portion of The Mansion was published in Mademoiselle under the title “By the People.”

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

eISBN: 978-0-307-79141-2

Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

THE HAMLET

Contents

Book One: Flem

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Book Two: Eula

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Book Three: The Long Summer

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Book Four: The Peasants

Chapter One

Chapter Two

THE TOWN

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

THE MANSION

Contents

Mink

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Linda

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Flem

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

William Faulkner

Other Books by This Author

Also by William Faulkner

INTRODUCTION

At the living center of the life work of William Faulkner are the novels and stories which deal with Yoknapatawpha County, that imaginary and deeply imagined place, at once based on and derived from his real home country, Lafayette County, Mississippi; but nevertheless independent with its own myths and legends, its own long and shadowy history, its diverse populations, its places much like places he had known and yet altogether his own invention. And at the heart of the fictional accounting of Yoknapatawpha County stands this trilogy—The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959)—here joined together, as he had always hoped and planned they would be, as one continuous and sequential narrative.

Since constant change, the overwhelming and universal energy of change (for the better and for the worse) is an almost obsessive theme in Faulkner’s fiction, the story of the Snopes family, from the Civil War until nearly the here and now, is itself constantly changing. There is consistency, to be sure, even though the books were written years apart, interrupted by other books and projects and at otherwise very busy times of his life. Faulkner and his later editors—Saxe Commins for The Town and Albert Erskine for The Mansion—made a serious effort to reduce and to modify, if not to eliminate discrepancies in the individual novels and, indeed, with many other bits and pieces of the Snopes story as it had emerged, early and late, in other novels and in many of the short stories. The author’s note at the outset of The Mansion is a kind of credo celebrating his “hopes that his entire life’s work is part of a living literature, and since ‘living’ is motion, and ‘motion’ is change and alteration and therefore the only alternative to motion is unmotion, stasis, death, there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four-year progress of this particular chronicle.…”