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Автор Уильям Фолкнер
Passion and Prejudice
This is a blazing novel of love and guilt, by one of America’s greatest writers, that movingly explores the passions and prejudices that exist in the deep South.
Trapped in a wave of mob hysteria. Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly Negro who is accused of the murder of a white man, is in danger of being lynched. Gavin Stevens, an eminent local lawyer, is determined to see justice done, but the stubborn old man refuses his help. Instead, it is to Gavin’s sixteen-year-old nephew, Chick, that Lucas confides the truth. To save the old man, Chick undertakes an eerie assignment—to invade the graveyard in the dead of the night and dig up the body of the man Lucas is accused of killing!
In a desperate race against time and the lynch mob’s fury, Chick unlocks the secret of the grave, only to disclose a further mystery that baffles the bloodthirsty townspeople.
This major American novel, by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is distinguished for its suspense, subtlety and gripping narrative power. Intruder in the Dust searches the conscience of the South as it wrestles with the demon of its guilt and love —its relationship to the Negro.
THIS BOOK IS A REPRINT OF THE ORIGINAL HARD COVER EDITION PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
Other SIGNET Books by
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
The Long Hot Summer (Book III of
Knight’s Gambit
Pylon
Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun
Sartoris
The Unvanquished
The Wild Palms and The Old Man
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Intruder in the Dust
A SIGNET BOOK
Published by THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
FIRST PRINTING, SEPTEMBER, 1949
SECOND PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1949
THIRD PRINTING, JANUARY, 1950
FOURTH PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1953
FIFTH PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1955
SIXTH PRINTING, OCTOBER, 1956
SEVENTH PRINTING, MARCH, 1958
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter One
IT WAS JUST NOON that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. He was there, waiting. He was the first one, standing lounging trying to look occupied or at least innocent, under the shed in front of the closed blacksmith’s shop across the street from the jail where his uncle would be less likely to see him if or rather when he crossed the Square toward the postoffice for the eleven oclock mail.
Because he knew Lucas Beauchamp too—as well that is as any white person knew him. Better than any maybe unless it was Carothers Edmonds on whose place Lucas lived seventeen miles from town, because he had eaten a meal in Lucas’ house. It was in the early winter four years ago; he had been only twelve then and it had happened this way: Edmonds was a friend of his uncle; they had been in school at the same time at the State University, where his uncle had gone after he came back from Harvard and Heidelberg to learn enough law to get himself chosen County Attorney, and the day before Edmonds had come in to town to see his uncle on some county business and had stayed the night with them and at supper that evening Edmonds had said to him:
