Mapped
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
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.
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The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The fall of the Compsons, an old Mississippi family, told four times over across three days in 1928 and one in 1910. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, and its town of Jefferson from Oxford, where he lived and is buried. The map grounds the invented county in that ground: the courthouse square, the Compson place, the pasture sold off to a golf course, the branch below it. Quentin's day belongs elsewhere, at Harvard and on the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mapped as scenes outside the setting.
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