William Faulkner is said to have recommended that readers unfamiliar with his work should begin with The Unvanquished. Probably his reason for this choice was not the book's relative ease of reading or quality, but because The Unvanquished provides an historical origin for the Southern attitudes and dilemmas that have shaped the South since the Civil War and hence Faulkner's fiction. Because historical fiction is generally not respected by critics, none have thought of The Unvanquished as historical fiction, although the novel comes close to that genre as it dramatizes how Southerners and the Sartoris family of Mississippi in particular responded when the war began to turn against the South with the fall of Vicksburg in 1863 and later with an action highlighted by invasion, defeat, Reconstruction, and to a limited extent, renewal. While The Unvanquished shows an erosion of values for the Sartoris family and their...