Light in August is a 1932 novel by American author William Faulkner. It belongs to the Southern gothic and modernist literary genres.

Set in the author’s present day, the interwar period, the novel centers on two strangers, a pregnant white woman and a man who passes as white but who believes himself to be of mixed ethnicity. In a series of flashbacks, the story reveals how these two people are connected to another man who has deeply impacted both their lives.

In a loose, unstructured modernist narrative style that draws from Christian allegory and oral storytelling, Faulkner explores themes of race, sex, class, and religion in the American South. By focusing on characters who are misfits, outcasts, or otherwise marginalized in their community, he portrays the clash of alienated individuals against a Puritanical, prejudiced rural society. Early reception of the novel was mixed, with some reviewers critical of Faulkner’s style and subject matter. However, over time, the novel has come to be considered one of the most important literary works by Faulkner and one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Plot

The novel is set in the American South in the 1930s, during the time of Prohibition and Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation in the South. It begins with the journey of Lena Grove, a young pregnant white woman from Doane’s Mill, Alabama, who is trying to find Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child. He has been fired from his job in Doane’s Mill and moved to Mississippi, promising to send word to her when he has a new job. Not hearing from Burch and harassed by her older brother for her illegitimate pregnancy, Lena walks and hitchhikes to Jefferson, Mississippi, a town in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

There she expects to find Lucas working at another planing mill, ready to marry her. Those who help her along her four-week trek are skeptical that Lucas Burch will be found, or that he will keep his promise when she catches up with him. When she arrives in Jefferson, Lucas is there, but he has changed his name to Joe Brown. Looking for Lucas, sweet, trusting Lena meets shy, mild-mannered Byron Bunch, who falls in love with Lena but feels honor-bound to help her find Joe Brown. Thoughtful and quietly religious, Byron is superior to Brown in every way, but his shyness prevents him from revealing his feelings to Lena.

The novel then switches to the second plot strand, the story of Lucas Burch/Joe Brown’s partner Joe Christmas. The surly, psychopathic Christmas has been on the run for years, ever since at least injuring, perhaps even killing his strict Presbyterian adopted father. Although he has light skin, Christmas suspects that he is of African American ancestry. Consumed with rage, he is a bitter outcast who wanders between black and white society, constantly provoking fights with blacks and whites alike. Christmas comes to Jefferson three years prior to the central events of the novel and gets a job at the mill where Byron, and later Joe Brown, work.

The job at the mill is a cover for Christmas’s bootlegging operation, which is illegal under Prohibition. He has a sexual relationship with Joanna Burden, an older woman who descended from a formerly powerful abolitionist family whom the town despises as carpetbaggers. Though their relationship is passionate at first, Joanna begins menopause and turns to religion, which frustrates and angers Christmas. At the end of her relationship with Christmas, Joanna tries to force him, at gunpoint, to kneel and pray. Joanna is murdered soon after: her throat is slit and she is nearly decapitated.

The novel leaves readers uncertain whether Joe Christmas or Joe Brown is the murderer. Brown is Christmas’ business partner in bootlegging and is leaving Joanna’s burning house when a passing farmer stops to investigate and pull Joanna’s body from the fire. The sheriff at first suspects Joe Brown, but initiates a manhunt for Christmas after Brown claims that Christmas is black.

The manhunt is fruitless until Christmas arrives undisguised in Mottstown, a neighboring town; he is on his way back to Jefferson, no longer running. In Mottstown, he is arrested and jailed, then moved to Jefferson. His grandparents arrive in town and visit Gail Hightower, the disgraced former minister of the town and friend of Byron Bunch. Bunch tries to convince Hightower to give the imprisoned Joe Christmas an alibi, but Hightower initially refuses.

Though his grandfather wants Christmas lynched, his grandmother visits him in the Jefferson jail and advises him to seek help from Hightower. As police escort him to the local court, Christmas breaks free and runs to Hightower’s house. A childishly cruel white vigilante, Percy Grimm, follows him there and, over Hightower’s protest, shoots and castrates Christmas. Having redeemed himself at last, Hightower is then depicted as falling into a deathlike swoon, his whole life flashing before his eyes, including the past adventures of his Confederate grandfather, who was killed while stealing chickens from a farmer’s shed.

Before Christmas’ escape attempt, Hightower delivers Lena’s child in the cabin where Brown and Christmas had been staying before the murder, and Byron arranges for Brown/Burch to come and see her. Brown deserts Lena once again, but Byron follows him and challenges him to a fight. Brown beats the braver, smaller Byron, then skillfully hops a moving train and disappears.

At the end of the story, an anonymous man is talking to his wife about two strangers he picked up on a trip to Tennessee, recounting that the woman had a child and the man was not the father. This was Lena and Byron, who were conducting a half-hearted search for Brown, and they are eventually dropped off in Tennessee.

Major characters

Lena Grove – a young pregnant woman from Alabama who has traveled to Jefferson while looking for Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child.

Byron Bunch – a bachelor who works at the planing mill in Jefferson, who meets and falls in love with Lena when she arrives in town. She has been told that a man named Bunch works at the mill and assumes it is Lucas Burch, because the name sounds similar.

Gail Hightower – the former minister of Jefferson, forced to retire after his wife was discovered to be having an affair in Memphis and committed suicide. He is a friend and mentor to Byron.

Lucas Burch/Joe Brown – the young man who fathered Lena’s child in Alabama and ran away when she told him she was pregnant. He has been living in Jefferson with Joe Christmas in a cabin on Joanna Burden’s property under the name Joe Brown and working with Christmas and Byron at the planing mill. He is also a bootlegger.

Joe Christmas – a man who came to Jefferson three years prior to the events in the novel. He lives in a cabin on the property of Joanna Burden and has a secret sexual relationship with her. Although he has light skin and is an orphan with no knowledge of his family background, he believes that one of his parents is of African-American ancestry, and this secret has caused him to be a habitual wanderer. He is employed at the planing mill until he begins to make a profit as a bootlegger.

Joanna Burden – the sole survivor in Jefferson of a family of abolitionists from New England who came to Jefferson after the Civil War. She is unmarried, lives alone in a manor house outside of Jefferson, and is secretly engaged in a sexual relationship with Joe Christmas. She is murdered, presumably by Christmas, at the start of the novel, and her house is burned down.

Secondary characters

Eupheus «Doc» Hines – the grandfather of Joe Christmas. He hates Christmas and gives him away to an orphanage when he is born, staying on as a janitor there in order to monitor the boy. Later, when he hears that Christmas is being held on suspicion of murdering Joanna Burden, he travels to Jefferson with his wife and begins to incite a lynch mob to kill Christmas.

Mrs. Hines – the grandmother of Joe Christmas. She has never seen Christmas after the night of his birth and travels to Jefferson to ensure that her husband does not successfully have him lynched, because she wants to see him again once more before he is tried for murder.

Milly Hines – the teenage mother of Joe Christmas. She conceives after a tryst with a member of a traveling circus, whom she claims is Mexican. She dies in childbirth after Eupheus Hines refuses to call a doctor for her.

Mr. McEachern – the adoptive father of Joe Christmas. He is a devout Presbyterian who tries to instill religion, even with repeated, abusive whipping, in the young defiant orphan he has adopted. He disapproves of Christmas’s growing disobedience and is himself beaten (and presumably killed) in a rage by Joe Christmas when he is 18. This abusive relationship of his childhood sheds important light on the formation of Christmas as a tortured and often cruel personality in his adulthood.

Mrs. McEachern – the adoptive mother of Joe Christmas. She tries to protect Christmas, though he hates her and pulls away from her attempts to be kind to him.

The dietitian – a woman who worked at the orphanage where Joe Christmas was raised. After he accidentally sees her with a man in her room, she tries unsuccessfully to have him transferred to an all-black orphanage.

Mr. Armstid – a man who picks up Lena on her way to Jefferson, lets her spend the night at his house, and then gives her a ride to the city on his wagon.

Mrs. Armstid – Armstid’s wife, who gives Lena