Intruder in the Dust

Intruder in the Dust (English: Intruder in the Dust) — a novel by American writer William Faulkner, published in 1948.

The main hero of the novel is Lucas Beauchamp (Beauchamp), a Black farmer who is wrongly accused of killing a white man. He is freed thanks to the efforts of a white and a Black teenager, as well as an old lady from a noble Southern family. The book is a kind of Faulkner’s response, as a Southern writer, to the racial problems that the South faces. In his “Selected Letters,” Faulkner wrote: “white people in the South, even before the North or the government or anyone else, must and are obliged to be responsible toward the Negroes..”

In 1949, director Clarence Brown made a film of the same name based on the novel; MGM paid Faulkner $50,000 for the film rights. The film was shot in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner’s hometown.

Most of the narrative in the novel is written as a stream of consciousness. The novel also includes long passages about the Civil War in the United States, one of which was quoted by historian Shelby Foote (en: Shelby Foote) in the documentary film Ken Burns’ The Civil War.

The characters Lucas Beauchamp and his wife Molly first appeared in Faulkner’s short story collection “Go, Moses.” Faulkner’s story “Lucas Beauchamp,” rejected by publishers in 1948, was published for the first time in 1999.

The year after the novel’s publication, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature—not for a specific novel, but overall for his “significant and artistically unique contribution to the development of the modern American novel.”