The Reivers

The Reivers: A Reminiscence, published in 1962, is the last novel by the American author William Faulkner. It was published a month before his death. The bestselling novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. Faulkner previously won this award for his book A Fable, making him one of only four authors to be awarded it more than once. Unlike many of his earlier works, it is a straightforward narration and eschews the complicated literary techniques of his more well-known works. It is a picaresque novel, and as such may seem uncharacteristically lighthearted given its subject matter. For these reasons, The Reivers is often ignored by Faulkner scholars or dismissed as a lesser work. He previously had referred to writing a "Golden Book of Yoknapatawpha County" with which he would finish his literary career. It is likely that The Reivers was meant to be this "Golden Book". The Reivers was adapted into a film of the same name directed by Mark Rydell and starring Steve McQueen as Boon Hogganbeck. In the early 20th century, an 11-year-old boy named Lucius Priest (a distant cousin of the McCaslin/Edmonds family Faulkner wrote about in Go Down, Moses) somewhat unwittingly gets embroiled in a plot to go to Memphis with dimwitted family friend and manservant Boon Hogganbeck. Boon steals (reives, thereby becoming a reiver) Lucius' grandfather's car, one of the first cars in Yoknapatawpha County. They discover that Ned McCaslin, a black man who works with Boon at Lucius' grandfather's stables, has stowed away with them (Ned is also a blood cousin of the Priests).…