Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi from nowhere with a gang of Haitian slaves and a design to found a dynasty. The design fails, the children destroy each other, and four narrators try to piece together what happened. Faulkner considered this his finest novel. The sentences are legendary: page-long constructions that coil and uncoil like the past they are trying to recover. The story is about the South, about slavery, about the doom that fathers pass to sons. Quentin Compson, narrating from Harvard, cannot escape Mississippi. The past is never dead. It is not even past.