William Faulkner. First edition, 16th printing. Dust Jacket: Near Fine. An unclipped jacket designed by E. McNight Kauffer. Hardcover: Fine. New York: Random House, 1948. No markings or writing in this pristine copy, 247 pp. Has code HB7D on seam of last page.
This was Faulkner's seventeenth novel and first since The Hamlet (1940). The author won the Nobel Prize in 1949 but didn't receive it until 1950.
Intruder in the Dust, explores the South's racial problems through the medium of a murder mystery. It was originally planned as a short story. But the work grew to the size of a novel and was not completed until April 1948.
Faulkner's novel is set in rural Mississippi during the 1940's. It deals with the murder of a white man and the black man accused of the killing. Was the basis for the 1949 Clarence Brown directed film adaptation by Ben Maddow and photographed by Robert Surtees.
"For sheer virtuosity in prose Faulkner has no American rival since Melville and James. There is no author I can think of since Chekhov who knows so deeply, and transmits so justly, the people he records in his legends; none of it has escaped the author's scrupulous memory, nor eluded his stirring, very great chronicle" (New York Times).
