Snopes

by William Faulkner

2011 · Modern Library

Here, published in a single volume as he always hoped they would be, are the three novels that comprise William Faulkner’s famous Snopes trilogy, a saga that stands as perhaps the greatest feat of this celebrated author’s incomparable imagination. The Hamlet, the first book of the series chronicling the advent and rise of the grasping Snopes family in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, is a work that Cleanth Brooks called “one of the richest novels in the Faulkner canon.” It recounts how the wily, cunning Flem Snopes dominates the rural community of Frenchman’s Bend—and claims the voluptuous Eula Varner as his bride. The Town, the central novel, records Flem’s ruthless struggle to take over the county seat of Jefferson, Mississippi. Finally, The Mansion tells of Mink Snopes, whose archaic sense of honor brings about the downfall of his cousin Flem. “For all his concerns with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man,” noted Ralph Ellison. “Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.”

Notes on the Descendants of Nicholas Stillwell

by William Henry Stillwell

1883

Nicholas Stillwell, an Englishman, and his first wife, Abagail, had two sons. After her death, he and his sons immigrated to America and settled on Manahttan Island, ca. 1638. There he married 2) Ann Van Dyke. They had seven children. The family later settled on the eastern shore of Staten Island, where he died in 1671. Descendants lived in New York and elsewhere. Few locality names mentioned.

With the Light Guns in '61-'65

by William Edward Woodruff

1903

This is primarily an Arkansas Civil War history.