Thomas Sutpen is a focal character of

William Faulkner William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of ...

's 1936 novel ''

Absalom, Absalom! ''Absalom, Absalom!'' is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the American Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life o ...

'' Sutpen arrives in Faulkner's imaginary

Yoknapatawpha County Yoknapatawpha County () is a fictional Mississippi county created by the American author William Faulkner, largely based upon and inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi, and its county seat of Oxford (which Faulkner renamed "Jefferson"). Faulk ...

Mississippi Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Miss ...

, in the 1830s and establishes a 64,000-acre (100-square-mile) plantation, Sutpen's Hundred, in an attempt to create his own dynasty. It is eventually revealed that Sutpen was born to a poor white family in what became West Virginia before moving to the Tidewater region of Virginia, where he was the first privy to the aristocratic plantation culture of the Antebellum South. When he was fourteen, running errands for his father, Sutpen was instructed by a black servant to use the back door of the plantation house. This led him to renounce his family and social position. He traveled to the West Indies to build his own plantation and start a lineage, in accordance with his "design". The discovery that his wife was part black, making his son Charles Bon part black, caused him to leave them behind and relocate to Yoknapatawpha County, where he built a new plantation. The sins of his past and his indiscriminate sexual practices eventually cause the downfall of his empire in the early 20th century. The short story "Wash", which was later incorporated into the seventh chapter of ''

'', focuses on Sutpen's death.

References

* Sutpen, Thomas Literary characters introduced in 1936 {{novel-char-stub