In late 1926 or early 1927, having just published one novel and written another, William Faulkner began two works that would become the foundation of his apocryphal Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and in which he would discover, and begin to develop, the fictional possibilities of his “’little postage stamp of native soil’” (Blotner, 192). The latter of these was
Flags in the Dust, a sprawling, diffuse novel of the aristocratic Sartoris and Benbow families centered primarily on Jefferson and the Sartoris plantation four miles north of town. The first, however, was much shorter, a fragment of what may have been an attempt at a novel, but that Faulkner abandoned in the middle of a page after writing only twenty-four pages. This was “Father Abraham”, Faulkner’s…
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Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "Father Abraham". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 April 2023 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39327, accessed 25 November 2024.]
