Ab Snopes, defeated by life, burns the barns of the wealthy men who employ him; his son Sarty must choose between family loyalty and justice. Faulkner published this story in 1939, and it is one of his finest, compressing the South's class resentments and moral agonies into a few pages. The fire is Ab's only power, his terrible eloquence. Sarty's choice breaks the family and perhaps saves his soul. The prose is dense, the emotions fierce.