Light in August is a 1932 novel by the American author William Faulkner. Set in Mississippi sixty-seven years after the American Civil War ended race-based slavery and twelve years after the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution entitled American women to vote, this novel by William Faulkner shows how racism and misogyny can persist; but its exploration of human prejudices goes well beyond those two. As Byron Bunch observes, “. . .when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance from truth and fact.” Speaking of his choice of title,... Faulkner said, ". . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.
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