Compson is a fictional family created by American author William Faulkner for use in his novels and short stories. A once prominent family in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the family began to fall on hard times in the twentieth century. The family name is referred to briefly in the opening chapter of Requiem for a Nun. Principally depicted in The Sound and the Fury and in its appendix, they also make appearances in Absalom, Absalom! and stories such as "That Evening Sun." Faulkner traced their genealogy from 1699 to 1945.
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)