Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel by the American writer William Faulkner, first published in 1936. It takes place before, during and after the American Civil War, and it concerns the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a plantation owner in the American South, told by people who were close to him and who disagree about what he was.

The novel is built out of accounts given by several narrators, among them Sutpen's son Quentin Compson and his friend Shreve at Harvard, and it circles the same events repeatedly, adding detail and contradiction each time. Sutpen's ambition, the marriage he made and the son he denied are the material, and the story is assembled rather than told in order.

Faulkner wrote the book in the middle of the novels set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, and its difficulty is deliberate: the reader has to work out both what happened and who is entitled to say so. It is usually named among his major works, and its method of circling one story with several narrators is the thing it is most often studied for.