from his captors as well, while he is being led across the town Some critics have speculated that the meaning of the title derives from a colloquial use of the word "light" to mean giving birth—typically used to describe when a cow will give birth and be "light" again—and connect this to Lena's pregnancy.

Words that spill from his pen and bleed on to these white sheets to taint our neat black-and-white categorizations. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.

to live with Joe Christmas in his cabin. Later, Mrs. Hines asks her husband what he did with Milly's baby — meaning Joe Christmas; eventually we learn that Joe Christmas is the Hines' grandson, born to their daughter, Milly. Lucas is surprised to see Lena, as well as the baby. He tells the town’s disgraced former minister, Reverend Gail Hightower, [1], All of the protagonists in the novel are misfits and social outcasts surrounded by an impersonal and largely antagonistic rural community, which is represented metonymically through minor or anonymous characters. chief suspect. But there is no denying that Faulkner knows his characters and, by extension, his readers. During the next five years, Hines watched Joe grow; Mrs. Hines had no idea if Joe was even alive. But there is no denying that Faulkner knows his characters and, by extension, his readers. There she expects to find Lucas working at another planing mill, ready to marry her. Time passes, and Joe eventually grows into a teenager. Light in August summary: Light in August is the story of several characters who move through their lives, affecting the lives of others, enduring hardships, overcoming obstacles, and sometimes succumbing to the hardships they face. Joe Christmas is an orphan who is abused as a child and believes he is of mixed racial ancestry but has no proof. So I'm back in school now, and for the first time in ages am being made to read books.

Though their relationship is passionate at first, Joanna begins menopause and turns to religion, which frustrates and angers Christmas. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... William Faulkner, American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Brown is Christmas' business partner in bootlegging and is leaving Joanna's burning house when a passing farmer stops to investigate and pull Joanna's body from the fire. In the 1930s, the publisher William Randolph Hearst was opposing President Franklin Roosevelt with the stance of "America First," arguing in favor of the nationalism popular in Germany and Italy. Milly Hines – the teenage mother of Joe Christmas. He has a sexual relationship with Joanna Burden, an older woman who descended from a formerly powerful abolitionist family whom the town despises as carpetbaggers. The sheriff hunts for Joe but is unable to track him down.

Joe Christmas, meanwhile, escapes Bobbie, a prostitute who works as a waitress in the nearby town. Surprisingly, Ward's black and from Mississippi. The story then flashes back even farther when Joe Christmas was five years old and living in an orphanage, and he inadvertently caught the dietician and another orphanage employee having sex. Because of this, Joe Christmas is fixated on the idea that he has some African American blood, which Faulkner never confirms, and views his parentage as an original sin that has tainted his body and actions since birth. A young man named Percy Grimm, who had organized men to guard the courthouse, jail, and square, followed Joe and eventually saw Joe run into Hightower's house. His grandparents arrive in town and visit Gail Hightower, the disgraced former minister of the town and friend of Byron Bunch. Upon Lena’s arrival in town, Brown is being held in the town jail In 1935, Maurice Coindreau translated the novel into French. Joe dies. This was Lena and Byron, who were conducting a half-hearted search for Brown, and they are eventually dropped off in Tennessee. When She dies in childbirth after Eupheus Hines refuses to call a doctor for her. The narrative then shifts to explore several of the characters’ pasts. This is a somewhat grim novel, with little evidence of hope for any of the characters who manage to walk away, but you will be hard pressed to find a more honest and unsentimental writer. Brown deserts Lena once again, but Byron follows him and challenges him to a fight. He is employed at the planing mill until he begins to make a profit as a bootlegger.

Later, he again returns to the cabin and finds Lena and her son alone.

While Byron is walking back to the cabin, a man in a passing wagon tells Byron that Joe has been killed. Christmas and Brown work together and form a relationship about which the other workers are unsure. We learn that Christmas — and perhaps Brown as well — supposedly lives in an old slave quarter on the grounds of an old plantation owned by Miss Joanna Burden. She hitches a ride into the small town of Jefferson, which is home to a planing mill. [25], According to Michael Millgate, though it is not typically considered Faulkner's best novel, Light in August was recognized early on as being "a major text, central to any understanding or evaluation of his career as a whole.