Yoknapatawpha County is a unified landscape, with its own cast of characters and its own history. In this sense, all of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction is related. Furthermore, insofar as the thematic unity of his work that he suggests in his Nobel Prize Speech really obtains, all of his work is related thematically. Only a few of the more obvious relationships can be mentioned here.

Of Faulkner's major social concerns, racism and the impact of mass culture remain important in virtually all of his novels. Go Down, Moses (1942), acted out of revised stories that had appeared earlier in magazines, deals powerfully with both of these concerns.

His interest in war touches many, but not all of his works, most notably The Unvanquished (1938), made up of previously published then revised Civil War stories, and A Fable (1954), an anti-war novel set during World War I. Although all of his...