The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A New Orleans "underworld bigshot" who marries Melisandre Backus. He dies in a New Orlean's barber chair of "his ordinary thirty-eight calibre occupational disease" (218) - i.e. he was shot by another gangster.

Melisandre Backus is the daughter and only child of a man who owns "one of our biggest plantations" (217). As a young woman she was a kind of romantic interest and protege of Gavin Stevens, but although she is "a shy girl," she marries a "New Orleans underworld bigshot named Harris" with whom she has two children (216). By the end of the novel, however, she and Gavin are married.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, elected to a record four terms (1933-1945). He is mentioned seven times in this novel, by name as "President Roosevelt" and "Mr. Roosevelt," and once by his famous initials, "F.D.R." (214).

Fighting with the "Royal Flying Corps" in World War I (204), John Sartoris shoots down "three huns" (212) in battle.

The twin brother of (Young) Bayard Sartoris; together they enlist in the "Royal Flying Corps" to serve in World War I (204). After "shooting down three huns" (i.e. German pilots, 212), John himself is shot down over France in July, 1918.

As a Benbow by birth, Narcissa is a member of one of the county's oldest families. According to Charles Mallison's narrative, she was "picked out" by the aunt of young Bayard Sartoris to be his wife (210). After their marriage, "he got Narcissa pregnant" (210). Their strained relationship is developed at length in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust (1929).

Youngest sister of Colonel John and "Carolina" Bayard Sartoris. She married a man named Du Pre who was killed in the Civil War. Here "Mrs Du Pre" is identified as Bayard's aunt; according to Charles Mallison's brief narrative reference to her, she "picked out Narcissa Benbow" and somehow got Bayard married to her (210).

The great-grandson of Colonel John Sartoris. Along with his twin brother John, he serves in the First World War with the "British troops" (207); after John is "shot down in July of '18," Bayard is "the last Sartoris Mohican" (210). He inadvertently kills his grandfather in an automobile accident, and dies himself flying an experimental airplane. His death is described in more detail in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust, where Bayard is a major character, and where his recklessness is attributed to his 'Lost Generation' despair over John's loss.

When Tug Nightingale attacks Skeets Magowan in the barbershop, "it takes all the barbers and customers and loafers" to subdue him (209).

There are a "considerable" number of "fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls" who admire Skeets Magowan as he makes sodas at the drugstore (208).