Absalom, Absalom!

Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Jefferson, from Oxford, the town where Faulkner lived and is buried. This novel maps the rise and ruin of Thomas Sutpen: his plantation twelve miles out in the county, the town that watched him, and the graves he left. Much of the story is told and retold decades later, some of it from a cold room at Harvard, so the map runs from the courthouse square out into the county and once far north to Cambridge.

Quentin Compson

The courthouse square, Jefferson

Chapter 1

The town of Jefferson is the still point the novel keeps returning to: the county seat where Sutpen first rides in as a stranger, buys his land, and later marries into a respectable family. Decades on it is where an ageing Rosa Coldfield summons young Quentin Compson to hear the story out. Oxford's courthouse square, with the county courthouse at its heart, is the ground Faulkner renamed Jefferson.

Chapter 1

inspired by Faulkner's Jefferson is fictional, but he built it openly on Oxford, Mississippi; this marks the real Lafayette County Courthouse at the centre of the Oxford square, the model for the county seat that watches the whole story.

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Rosa Coldfield

Miss Rosa Coldfield's house, Jefferson

Chapter 1

The book opens in a hot, shuttered parlour in town on a September afternoon in 1909, where Rosa Coldfield, decades a spinster, has called Quentin to listen. Her telling of Thomas Sutpen, the man who nearly married her, is where the layered narration begins. The house stands in Jefferson, the county-seat town Faulkner modelled on Oxford.

Chapter 1

inspired by The Coldfield house is fictional and Faulkner gives no real address; this marks a representative point in the old residential blocks just off the Oxford square, the kind of in-town lot the novel imagines it on.

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