William Faulkner, The Hamlet

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What eventually became

The Hamlet

(New York: Random House, 1940), William Faulkner's twelfth novel, his eighth about Yoknapatawpha (the apocryphal Mississippi county he created in his fiction), and the first volume of his Snopes trilogy, had its origins in the 1920s in stories swapped back and forth between Faulkner and his friend, Phil Stone, an Oxford, Mississippi, attorney, about the rise of poor whites and rednecks in social, political, and economic competition with the old southern aristocracy. Stone, in fact, claimed to have invented the Snopeses, but it was Faulkner who immortalized them.

Faulkner's first attempt at a Snopes novel, “Father Abraham”, written about 1926 or 1927, but not published in its original form until 1983 (ed. James B. Meriwether), breaks off after only two

3206 words

Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "The Hamlet". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 May 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=658, accessed 28 March 2024.]

658 The Hamlet 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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