Light in August

Faulkner’s seventh novel, published in 1932, and the one in which he takes on race directly. Three lives cross in a Mississippi town: Lena Grove, walking the roads pregnant and looking for the man who left her; Gail Hightower, a minister put out of his pulpit and living alone with his grandfather’s Civil War; and Joe Christmas, a drifter who does not know whether he is white or Black and is destroyed by the fact that the question can be asked of him at all.

Context: First published 1932. 512 pages in the Vintage corrected text. Lexile 870. Filed under Fiction. The novel uses the racial epithets and the racial thinking of its setting throughout, and Joe Christmas’s story is constructed to show that the categories doing the killing are social inventions rather than facts about him — a reading most critics accept, though the book’s handling of race and of its women characters remains argued over.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; a 468-title reading list published in December 2025 by the Substack writer Dissident Teacher, of which Kyle is carding only the Ages 13-99+ band.
• William Faulkner — the author.
• As I Lay Dying — the earlier Faulkner novel on the same list.
• The Sound and the Fury — the other Faulkner title in this band.
• Literature