William Faulkner's fictional chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County culminates in his last three novels, rich with the accumulated history and lore of the microcosmic domain where he set most of his novels and stories. Faulkner wanted to use the time remaining to him to achieve a summing-up of his fictional world: "I know I won't live long enough to write all I need to write about my imaginary country and county," he wrote to a friend, "so I must not waste what I have left."

The Town (1957) is the second novel in the Snopes trilogy that began with The Hamlet (collected in a previous Library of America volume). Here the rise of the rapacious Flem Snopes and his extravagantly extended family as they connive their way into power in the county seat of Jefferson, is brilliantly filtered through three separate narrative voices. Flem's relentless drive toward wealth and control plays itself out in The Mansion (1959), in which a wronged relative finally succeeds in avenging himself and bringing down the corrupt Snopes dynasty. His last novel, The Reivers: A Reminiscence (1962), is mellower and more elegiac than his earlier work. A picaresque adventure involving a Memphis brothel, a racehorse, and a stolen automobile, it evokes the world of childhood with a final burst of comic energy.