Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Summary

John Chapman. “New Faulkner Novel Expands Prior Ideas.” Dallas Morning News, September 26, 1948, Section VI, p. 6.

William Faulkner in his first novel since 1940 seems to me to be expanding a series of problems which he first stated explicitly in the collection of short stories, Go Down, Moses (1942), but which had been implicit in almost all his previous writing. Intruder in the Dust may well be one of the larger fragments which originally was meant for Go Down, Moses, since the setting and the characters are all identical, and since it is not greatly longer than one of the stories in that collection.

The argument, briefly, is that Lucas Beauchamp, a mulatto with some of the best white blood of Jefferson in his veins, is in prison following the murder of one of the Gowrie clan who live in the nearby hills. A lynching bee is imminent, but for some reason the Gowries, ordinarily a dangerous group of men, remain strangely quiet. The town awaits them, but while they delay Gavin Stevens' nephew, named Chick, a colored youth about Chick's own age and an elderly spinster set out to discover the real killer of the Gowrie. Since in some measure the effect of the story depends upon the solution of the crime, one need not elaborate the plot further.

That plot, however, is incidental to the character of Lucas Beauchamp, as intractable and stiffnecked a Negro as ever irritated a Southerner. What Chick Stevens discovered to his amazement was that Lucas possessed the same feelings and followed the same code as did the best white men of the region.