Do research about daily life in the South at the turn of the century. The story talks about people having telephones in their houses—when did telephones come into common household use? What appliances and tools do we have now that people did not have then? How do you think this made their lives different?

Investigate race relations in the South from the end of the Civil War to the start of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. What was "Jim Crow"? What kinds of work did African Americans do? What possibilities did they have for advancement in society?

Read more work by William Faulkner about his imaginary county in Mississippi. Focus especially on work that involves characters who appear in "That Evening Sun": Quentin, Caddy, and Jason Compson, and Dilsey. Some good sources are the novels The Sound and...