Light in August

Light in August is a novel by the American writer William Faulkner, published in 1932. It is set in the American South of the 1930s, during the years of Prohibition and of the Jim Crow laws that legalised racial segregation there.

The book opens with Lena Grove, who is pregnant and unmarried and who has walked a long way looking for the man who left her. The other stranger at the centre of it is Joe Christmas, a man who passes as white and who believes that he has some African American ancestry, which in that place and time is the fact that decides how he will be treated.

A series of flashbacks reveals how the two of them are connected to a third person, the Reverend Gail Hightower, whose mind keeps returning to visions of Confederate cavalry. The narrative is loose and it moves backwards and forwards in time, drawing on Christian allegory and on the way stories are told aloud in that part of the country.

Faulkner writes about people who are misfits and outcasts in their own community, and the novel is an account of what happens when individuals like that come up against a rural society that is prejudiced and hard. It is now read as one of the most important of his books.