Characters

• Lena Grove: A young pregnant woman from Alabama searching for the father of her unborn child. She is naive and determined.
• Joe Christmas: A man who believes he has mixed racial ancestry and grapples with his identity. He is deeply troubled and prone to violence.
• Byron Bunch: A kind mill worker who falls in love with Lena and tries to help her. He is shy and honorable.
• Gail Hightower: A disgraced former minister who lives as a recluse, haunted by visions of his Confederate grandfather.
• Joanna Burden: A middle-aged woman from an abolitionist family who has a relationship with Joe Christmas. She is murdered early in the novel.
• Lucas Burch/Joe Brown: The father of Lena's child, who abandoned her. A bootlegger and Christmas's partner.
• Eupheus “Doc” Hines: Joe Christmas's racist grandfather who gave him up for adoption. He tries to incite violence against Christmas.
• Mrs. Hines: Christmas's grandmother, who tries to protect him from Doc Hines.
• Percy Grimm: A fanatical member of the National Guard who kills and castrates Joe Christmas.
• Mr. and Mrs. McEachern: Christmas's abusive adoptive parents who try to instill strict religion in him.

Quick facts

• Light in August, published in 1932, was William Faulkner's seventh novel.
• The novel’s working title was “Dark House” before Faulkner changed it to Light in August, based on a casual remark from his wife about the quality of light in August.
• The book is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
• The novel has 21 chapters, which some scholars believe corresponds to the 21 chapters in the Gospel of John.
• Light in August explores themes of race, religion, and alienation in the American South.
• The novel uses a non-linear narrative structure with frequent flashbacks and shifts in perspective.
• Joe Christmas, one of the main characters, is believed to be partially based on a real man Faulkner knew who was unsure of his racial identity.
• The character Gail Hightower was inspired by a disgraced minister Faulkner knew in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi.
• TIME magazine included Light in August on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
• Light in August has been translated into more than 30 languages.

About the author

William Faulkner is widely recognized as one of the most influential American novelists of the 20th century. Born in 1897, he spent most of his life in the small town of Oxford, Mississippi, and drew heavily on the history and culture of the American South in his writing. He is best known for his novels set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi—a place nearly identical to Lafayette County, in which Oxford is located—including The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

Faulkner’s distinctive prose style is marked by long and winding sentences, experimental techniques such as stream of consciousness and multiple narrators, and meticulous attention to diction and cadence. His complex, often Gothic stories explore themes of family bonds and dysfunction, and the dynamics of gender and race. Along with his novels, Faulkner was a prolific writer of short stories, many of which are considered classics. He also worked periodically as a screenwriter in Hollywood, contributing to films like Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946).

Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." He also won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards. Ralph Ellison called him “the greatest artist the South has produced.” His legacy to literature remains far reaching, influencing writers from Cormac McCarthy to Gabriel García Márquez to Jesmyn Ward. Faulkner died of a heart attack in 1962, at the age of 64.