Faulkner was working closely with materials based on his own family in Sartoris and The Unvanquished. Of the many biographies on Faulkner, Joseph Blotner's Faulkner: A Biography (1974) does the best job of dealing with Colonel John Falkner and his descendants who mirror the fictional John and Bayard Sartoris. John Falkner's military career during the Civil War, the shooting of Colonel Falkner, and the revival of the family fortunes through a railroad now a part of the Illinois Central are repeated in the novel. After reading the chapter, "The Ancestors," in Blotner, contrast and compare the factual details of the family to the fictional details of the novel to see how closely Faulkner is working with his sources and try to estimate why he makes the changes he does and their effects.

Fiction is sometimes very close to fact, and it is fascinating to see how close...