Go Down, Moses

“This land. This South. This curse.”

William Faulkner’s most powerful meditation on race, land, and the American conscience is a novel in seven stories—a family saga that spans generations and asks the question the South has never answered: what do we owe the people we have wronged?

The McCaslin family has owned the same Mississippi land for generations. They have farmed it, hunted it, and been corrupted by it. The novel’s centerpiece is “The Bear,” one of the greatest short stories ever written, in which young Ike McCaslin learns to hunt—and learns that his grandfather had children with a slave woman, and that those children were his own blood. Ike renounces his inheritance. He cannot live on land bought with the flesh of his own family. The other stories circle around this revelation: a woman who burns down a plantation; a man who hunts a deadly bear; a young soldier who never comes home; and an old woman who refuses to leave the land her ancestors were sold on.

This is Faulkner at his most moral and lyrical: a novel about the wilderness that is disappearing, the sins that cannot be washed away, and the men who try—and fail—to live decently in an indecent world. Go Down, Moses is Faulkner’s King Lear: a story about inheritance, madness, and the land that outlasts us all.

• Published in 1942, a collection of seven interconnected stories that function as a novel

• Contains “The Bear,” one of the most celebrated works of American short fiction

• Explores themes of race, incest, land ownership, and the legacy of slavery in the American South

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

• Ebook: DRM-free EPUB compatible with Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and all major e-readers.

• Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.

A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears—or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the land remembers everything, even when we try to forget.

About the Author

William Faulkner (1897–1962) was an American novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, he spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, the model for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Go Down, Moses was his twelfth novel, published in 1942. The novel grew out of several short stories Faulkner had written over the previous decade, including “The Bear,” “The Old People,” and “Delta Autumn.” Faulkner wove them together into a single volume, but critics have debated whether it is a novel or a story collection. Faulkner considered it a novel. The book was not a commercial success (World War II paper shortages limited its print run), but it was praised by critics. His other major works include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize twice. He died of a heart attack in 1962.