'The Reivers' Is Published

The Reivers, published in 1962, is the last novel by the American author William Faulkner.

The bestselling novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. Faulkner previously won this award for his book A Fable, making him one of only three authors to be awarded it more than once. Unlike many of his earlier works, it is a straightforward narration and eschews the complicated literary techniques of his greatest works. It is a picaresque novel, and as such may seem uncharacteristically lighthearted given its subject matter. For these reasons, The Reivers is often ignored by Faulkner scholars or dismissed as a lesser work. He previously had referred to writing a "Golden Book of Yoknapatawpha County" with which he would finish his literary career. It is likely that The Reivers was meant to be this "Golden Book".

While writing the Reivers Faulkner had no certainty that it would be his final novel. He could not anticipate his own death, and he was not yet even sixty-five years old. Yet in his final years he occasionally spoke as if he were finished writing, as if he were ready to break his pencil; and there is an appropriate finality to The Reivers that makes it seem a book intended to round things off, to be a coda to a grandly orchestrated symphony. Book's on Faulkner's career address it as a farewell, tying up matters by means of a grandfather's reminiscence to his grandchildren on all that has gone before.