The Hamlet - Paperback

This darkly comic masterpiece is the first novel in Faulkner's trilogy about the Snopes family, the grasping clan that comes to dominate Yoknapatawpha County after the fall of the Confederacy.

Front Jacket

The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes -- wily, energetic, a man of shady origins -- quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.