Sanctuary

Horace Benbow, a Mississippi lawyer unhappy in his own marriage, wanders into the orbit of a bootlegger named Lee Goodwin and a menacing, impotent criminal known as Popeye almost by accident, drawn in after a chance encounter at Goodwin's remote still. The novel's real catastrophe begins separately, when a college student named Temple Drake is brought to the same isolated house by her irresponsible date, Gowan Stevens, who gets drunk, wrecks his car, and then abandons her there overnight among men Faulkner makes clear are dangerous to a young woman with nowhere else to go. Popeye murders a mentally disabled man named Tommy who tries to protect her, then assaults Temple with a corncob in one of the most notorious scenes in American fiction, and takes her afterward to a Memphis brothel run by a woman named Miss Reba, where he keeps her for weeks. When Goodwin is charged with both crimes he did not commit, Benbow takes on his defense, only to watch Temple, called to testify, falsely swear that Goodwin, not Popeye, was responsible for everything that happened to her. The jury convicts Goodwin in eight minutes, and a mob drags him out of the jail that same night and burns him alive before Benbow, who witnesses it and very nearly shares Goodwin's fate himself, can do anything to stop it. Popeye is arrested separately soon after and hanged for a murder in another state that, in a final bitter irony, he did not actually commit. The novel's last pages find Temple in Paris with her father, in the Luxembourg Garden, unpunished and essentially unchanged by everything her lie destroyed.

Faulkner tells this story with none of the difficulty of his most experimental novels, and its comparative directness is part of what made it his first commercial success; it reads briskly, almost like the crime fiction its plot resembles on the surface, while carrying a bleakness that genre fiction of the period rarely allowed itself. Faulkner later revised the manuscript substantially at his own expense after his publisher balked at the original version, toning down certain elements before it went to print, though scholars still debate exactly how much of his own later description of the book as written purely for money should be taken at face value.

The corncob assault scene, referred to only obliquely by Faulkner even as its consequences drive the entire plot, became the single detail Sanctuary was known for on publication, and it is the detail most responsible for the novel's reputation, then and since, as the bleakest thing Faulkner ever wrote.