A Fable

Author William Faulkner considered A Fable to be his masterpiece, and laboured more than a decade on the manuscript. Recently it has come to be considered one of the major works in Faulkner’s canon and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre. Faulkner himself fought in the war, and his descriptions of it "rise to magnificence," according to The New York Times, and include, in Malcolm Cowley's words, "some of the most powerful scenes he ever conceived."

“A modern allegory... conceived as World War II approached its last year, the story envisions World War I — in the trenches in France — coming to an end as the soldier's mutiny. The inspiration of the mass movement is a figure symbolic of the Christ. The action parallels the span of Holy Week — with the triumphant entry, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the resurrection. Judas is there, and Peter, the apostles, Pilate and Herod, the Marys, and so on — recognizable, but distorted-although never with irreverence. Creatively, it is an extraordinary achievement with its underlying commentary on an unready world. Practically, it is difficult reading, and often obscure.”   -  Kirkus Reviews

William Cuthbert Faulkner  It is one of the more remarkable feats of American literature, how a young man who never graduated from high school, never received a college degree, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, all the while balancing a growing family of dependents and impending financial ruin, could during the Great Depression write a series of novels all set in the same small Southern county that would one day be recognized as among the greatest novels ever writ