Absalom, Absalom!, first published in 1936, William Faulkner tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, the enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s with a French architect and a band of wild Haitian Negroes to wrest his fabulous mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. 

He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him." His tragedy left its impress not only on those who knew him personally, but also on those, like Quentin Compson, who are haunted, even into the twentieth century, by Sutpen's legacy of ruthlessness and his single minded disregard of the human community. 

Many readers consider Absalom, Absalom! to be William Faulkner's finest achievement.