William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, to upper-middle-class parents. The family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1902, and except for brief travels elsewhere, Faulkner spent the rest of his life there. Faulkner was greatly influenced by the stories of his family and lineage, which extended as far back as his great-grandfather, William Clark Faulkner, who was a colossal figure in North Mississippian history. Faulkner grew up listening to stories of his ancestors, which were deeply rooted in the history of the American South, slavery, and the Civil War; his engagement with oral storytelling, memory, and generational lineages bounded by geography would go on to play a significant role in his fiction, which was also rooted in family histories and genealogies within Mississippi. In his teens, Faulkner was introduced to the work of James Joyce, a key figure in the Modernist literary movement; this was one of Faulkner’s earliest exposures to the stylistic literary innovations that would come to mark his own novels later on.

On multiple occasions, Faulkner tried to join the US Army but was rejected. In 1929, Faulkner published Sartoris, which was his first novel that dealt with the Civil War, followed shortly after by The Sound and the Fury. Throughout the next decade, Faulkner wrote novels that would later be recognized as indispensable to the American Modernist and Southern Gothic traditions: As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In 1949, Faulkner was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the world’s most prestigious literary award. Throughout his oeuvre, Faulkner draws on his immersion in the culture of the Southern United States to critically depict slavery, the Civil War, the plantation economy, racism, and legacies of race-based violence. Faulkner is considered one of the most important writers in the English literary canon for his complex, stylistic dealings with these topics.

Absalom, Absalom! is one of many texts by Faulkner that take place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. This Southern American locale spans Faulkner’s works, including The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light In August (1932). Just as Faulkner uses this recurring backdrop for his novels, he also uses recurring characters across his work, most notably the Compson family, who is central to The Sound and the Fury, and critical to the storytelling within Absalom, Absalom! In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner introduces several members of the Compson family; some, including Quentin and his father Jason, narrate parts of the Sutpen family story in the later text Absalom, Absalom! The Compson family is connected to the Sutpens through the friendship between Quentin Compson’s grandfather, most often referred to as General Compson, and Thomas Sutpen, who meets General Compson as he begins to build a plantation 12 miles beyond the main town in Yoknapatawpha County. This multigenerational relationship between the Compsons and the Sutpens illustrates many themes that permeate both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, including the fall of the American South and inherited or generational fates or destinies. Likewise, Yoknapatawpha County becomes a microcosmic representation of issues throughout the broader Southern United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the Civil War, Jim Crow, the decline of the plantation economy, and the loss of identity and stability within the once-thriving agricultural region.

Faulkner was critical to the American Modernist cultural and artistic movement, which emerged in the early 20th century through transatlantic exchanges between eminent European writers including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Modernist writing—within both British and American variants—shared the common pursuit of narrative experimentation, which arose due to an artistic impulse to respond to and represent the massive, tumultuous changes in society from the late 19th century onward. This narrative experimentation consisted of innovative literary strategies such as oscillations between point-of-view and perspective, focusing on individual consciousness and subjectivity, and concerns with memory and representations of past events. Faulkner’s work, and especially Absalom! Absalom!, is a critical example of these Modernist narrative styles. These include the non-signaled shifts between speakers throughout the novel, the way characters misremember or reinterpret events from the past across generations, and the long, run-on sentences that imitate individuals’ flowing, discursive thought processes.

Within American Modernism, Faulkner’s work also falls within the Southern Gothic subgenre, which emerged as a reflection of American Southern culture after the collapse of the Confederacy in the Civil War. The fall of the Confederacy resulted in a vacuum of religious, cultural, and social values across the South, where the bedrock of life was altered due to the new illegality of slavery, the massive loss of multiple generations of men, and the decay and destruction of homes, farms, and cities. Because of this new post-war Southern world, Southern Gothic writers were concerned with representations of the decay of the old antebellum South; as such, the genre is often marked by grotesque or violent imagery, morally void and questionable behavior often fueled by racism, and the attempted continuity of tradition through storytelling, some of which has supernatural or mythic undercurrents.