In The Hamlet I.O. Snopes calls himself "a single man, unfortunately" (225), but to the surprise of Frenchman's Bend, three years after he arrived in the hamlet he turns out to have a wife, a "big gray-colored woman" (292). When she appears with "a baby six months old" in a carriage, I.O. "takes one look at that buggy" and vanishes (293). Her character is not developed further in this novel. In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Town, it turns out that she is only one of I.O.'s wives - he is a twice-married man, i.e. a bigamist.
I.O. Snopes' career as a character begins with the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, and after six more appearances ends three decades later in The Mansion. In those eight texts his various jobs include restaurant manager, cotton speculator, mule trader, blacksmith and schoolteacher. In all of these contexts he is both comically out of place and nonetheless vaguely alarming - and impossible to get into a single focus, as Faulkner re-invents him more than once.
Wesley Snopes is the father of Virgil and Byron. He appears as "the actual Snopes schoolmaster" instead of by name in The Town (42) and by name in The Mansion. In both novels, in addition to being the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend, he is a religious figure, a "revival song-leader" (Mansion, 79) "whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place" (Town, 43).
Although Flem, Montgomery Ward, I.O. and Clarence are mentioned in Flags in the Dust, in that first Yoknapatawpha fiction Byron is the first Snopes whom Faulkner develops into a character. Many Snopeses are named for famous men or products in American culture (vide "Montgomery Ward"). 'Byron Societies' were bourgeois reading groups in the U.S. about the time Byron Snopes would have been born - there is even a "Byron Club" in Jefferson in The Town (325) - but it's hard to imagine Byron's parents (revealed in the Snopes trilogy to be I.O.
Although through most of the 1930s and 1940s Gavin Stevens looks like a confirmed bachelor, in four late fictions Faulkner decided to add love and marriage to his biography. The woman he marries was born Melisandre Backus, the descendant of the Melisandre who married a Backus in the middle of the Civil War ("My Grandmother Millard") and more immediately the only child of a Yoknapatawpha plantation owner. By the time she marries Gavin, she is the widow of a New Orleans gangster and the mother of two children.
In Requiem for a Nun, Temple and Gowan Stevens' son is "about four" (60). The older brother of the murdered infant, the perceptive Bucky asks his mother, "How long will we stay in California, mamma?" and "Will we stay here until they hang Nancy, mamma?" (61).
As Temple Drake, she is the principal character in Sanctuary (1931); as Temple Drake Stevens, she is at the center of the dramatic portions of Requiem for a Nun. She is (as she says frequently in the first novel) the daughter of a judge, a member of an aristocratic family, and a very complex young woman. In the first novel she is a seventeen-year-old college student, "a small childish figure no longer quite a child, not yet quite a woman" (89), the heir to southern traditions trying on the contemporary role of flapper.
There's no question that the Stevenses are one of the oldest families in Yoknapatawpha, but they may or may not be among the very first. When the most famous Stevens - Gavin - appears in Light in August, the narrator simply says his "ancestors" "owned slaves in Jefferson (444). In "Hand upon the Waters," however, one of the Knight's Gambit stories in which Gavin becomes a kind of detective, the narrator identifies the earliest "Stevens" as one of the first three white men to settle in what became Jefferson.
In The Sound and the Fury Herbert Head, whom Mrs. Compson calls "my Harvard boy" (93), is a banker from South Bend, Indiana. He and the already-pregnant Caddy meet in the fashionable resort of French Lick; in April 1910 they marry after Herbert promises Jason a job in the family bank, and tries to bribe Quentin to keep secret his expulsion from Harvard for cheating. The marriage does not last a year: when he discovers Caddy's pregnancy, Herbert disowns her and her child.
