William Faulker wrote about the Snopes family of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi in three full novels, plus some short stories and mentioning them in other novels over the years. I had never read any of his work, so decided it's never too late to start. At the library I found a thick book titled "Snopes" containing the three Snopes novels: "The Hamlet (1940)," "The Town (1957)," and "The Mansion (1959)." The tale starts out in the late 1800s and takes us past World War Two.

The common thread through the three novels is Flem Snopes, to whom money is the most important thing, and his life's work is to use sharp dealing to weasel it away from everybody else any way he can. I suppose some might sum up the Snopes family as white trash, but it isn't that so much as very interesting people whose motives aren't always as pure as they could be, sounding like a euphemism for white trash.

Here is an excerpt from "The Mansion:"

'His uncle told him how back in 1943 the town suddenly learned that Flem Snopes now owned what was left of the Compson place. Which wasn't much. The tale was they sold a good part of it off back in 1909 for the municipal golf course in order to send the oldest son, Quentin, to Harvard, where he committed suicide at the end of his freshman year; and about ten years ago the youngest son, Benjy, the idiot, had set himself and the house both on fire and burned up in it. That is, after Quentin drowned himself at Harvard and Candace's, the sister's, marriage blew up and she disappeared, nobody knew where, and her daughter, Quentin, that nobody knew who her father was, climbed down the rainpipe one night and ran off with a carnival, Jason, the middle one, finally got rid of Benjy too by finally persuading his mother to commit him to the asylum only it didn't stick, Jason's version being that his mother whined and wept until he, Jason, gave up and brought Benjy back home, where sure enough in less than two years Benjy not only burned himself up but completely destroyed the house too.'

Not your one for short sentences is our Mr. Faulkner. We're lucky he throws in a comma somewhere once in awhile. I love his writing style because it is so much the way people talk, or at least the people I enjoy listening to, and in his books he tells and re-tells the stories from different points of view so you eventually find out exactly what happened, but just like real life, it usually isn't clearly laid out at the get-go; you have to wait patiently for it, just like real life.