75 years ago in 1932

The story of "Light in August" begins when a very pregnant, young and unwed Lena Grove leaves barefoot from her home in Alabama in search of her child's father who is rumored to be somewhere in Jefferson, Mississippi. Her lover Lucas Burch is in Jefferson, working at the town mill under the alias of Joe Brown. His partner Joe Christmas is a quiet drifter who people don't know much about. The two men live secretly together behind an old plantation house on the outskirts of town, in an abandoned slave cabin and from there they bootleg moonshine. Ironically the woman who now owns the plantation house is the daughter of yankee abolitionists who moved down to Jefferson during the reconstruction period. Around 100 pages into the story her house catches on fire, and when people go inside they find this woman with her head cut almost all the way off. Through her death it is discovered that not only was she aware of the Joe's living situation on her property, but that she had been having an illicit affair all along with Joe Christmas. The police are ready to go search for Christmas when Joe Brown stumbles into the precinct drunk with information about his former partner. Brown confesses his knowledge of the affair and informs them that not only did Christmas kill a white woman, but that he himself is half black. So the police set out with bloodhounds on his trail and that's where I've left off.
There is a reoccurring theme in many Faulkner stories of the local town vs. the individual who has been ostracized due to actions that are perceived to be outside of the moral code. These people or their families have commit ed crimes so unforgivable that they are forced to live out the rest of their lives as unloved spinsters and freaks, usually on the outskirts of town. Even the houses they live in seem to take on the for boding quality of those who dwell inside. The characters who have been shunned from society keep to themselves, never leave their house unless necessary and in their physical absence their emotional presence over the town becomes larger than life until they are no longer people but living parables. One example in "Light in August" is the Reverend who loses his entire congregation because he loses control over his wife, a young woman who is discovered to be whoring around in hotels in Memphis. She is thrown to her death from a window one night by a man in a drunken rage and the story is all over the Jefferson papers the next day. In losing complete control over his woman and bringing scandal to the community the priest is forced from his pulpit and almost intimidated by the KKK into leaving town. The most intriguing thing about these characters is that they decide to stay until the bitter end, but for what reason? Why would someone choose to stay where they were so hated? Faulkner writes as though they are so chained to the ghosts of their past that they could not escape if they tried. His work is concerned with the weight of history and the manner in which we relate to our pasts.