The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Gavin Stevens' house, like Gavin's character, becomes an increasingly important location in the 9 fictions it appears in after it is first used as a Location in Light in August. It seems essentially the same in all of them, though the amount of detail about it varies considerably. A composite description could start by noting the similarity between this place and the Compson place. Both are in town, but have outbuildings like a pasture "lot," a "stable" and a "woods" (Intruder in the Dust, 38, 88). Both have been in the family for at least several generations.

Two of Faulkner's most prominent characters are among the four who attend Harvard, the oldest and among the most prestigious American colleges: Quentin Compson and Gavin Stevens. Quentin spends most of his section in The Sound and the Fury wandering in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harvard is located, but the section begins and ends in his dorm room somewhere on the campus. That space is actually the setting for about half of Absalom, Absalom! as he and his roommate Shreve try to reconstruct the story of Thomas Sutpen.

The University of Mississippi in Oxford opened in 1844, fifteen years before Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon meet there in Absalom, Absalom! According to Mr. Compson in that novel, in 1859 it is "a small new college in the Mississippi hinterland" (58). The "grove at the University" where Mr. Compson speculates Henry first sees Bon is a real part of the campus (76). The two young men both attend the Law School, which opened in 1854. A generation later Bayard Sartoris is a law student there in The Unvanquished. None of these young men graduate.

In the woods near the railroad tracks Joe Brown (AKA Lucas Burch) comes upon "a negro cabin" in a clearing (Light in August, 433). When he asks the "old negro woman" who sits on its porch who lives there, she says "Aint nobody here but me and the two little uns" (434).