Around this time, the outlines of Yoknapatawpha County had begun to come hazily into William Faulkner’s view, like a morning mist rising above the fields. There was the town of Jefferson, the county seat, with the courthouse set down right in the middle of it, just like Oxford, and roads radiating out to the points of the compass. It stretched from the sinuous Tallahatchie River in the north—a river that existed in Lafayette and Yoknapatawpha counties—to the Yoknapatawpha river in the south, which existed only in Faulkner’s imagination. Yoknapatawpha County was a permeable overlay that covered the contours of the land that William Faulkner knew best. It was populated by unforgettable families like the Snopeses, the Sartorises, the Sutpens, the Compsons, the Varners, and a host of thoroughly black residents like Dilsey and “possible blacks” like Joe Christmas, whose doubts about whether he was black or not led to his violent death. The Snopes and the Sartoris families appeared as early as 1926, in works in progress. The Compsons first appeared in 1929 in The Sound and the Fury.
Meanwhile, back in Lafayette County, Estelle, with her two children in tow, had returned from the Orient, where her marriage to Cornell Franklin had fallen to pieces. Faulkner had pretty much gotten over her (by falling in love with another woman who eventually broke his fragile heart). But her miserable situation and his sense of responsibility moved him. In 1929 he borrowed some money for the honeymoon and married her. The Sound and the Fury came out to admiring reviews but little commercial success. Faulkner got a job working the night shift at the University power plant and wrote As I Lay Dying, where Yoknapatawpha County was first mentioned.
