"Barn Burning" is a short story by the American author William Faulkner which first appeared in Harper's in June 1939 (pp.
The story deals with class conflicts, the influence of fathers, and vengeance as viewed through the third-person perspective of a young, impressionable child.
[4] "Barn Burning" (set in about 1895) opens in a country drug store, which is doubling as a Justice of the Peace Court.
Sarty, his older brother, and his father get into the family wagon, where his mother, aunt, and two sisters are waiting.
The next day the Snopes family arrives at their new home, a shack on the farm where they will be working as tenant farmers.
In defiance of the request for politeness, Snopes pushes past with a racial insult and tracks the excrement all over the white rug in the front room.
He tells Abner that he is going to charge him twenty extra bushels of corn to pay for the hundred-dollar rug.
The Justice decides that Abner is responsible for the damage to the rug, but he reduces the fee to ten bushels.
His father and brother realize that Sarty is planning on alerting de Spain, and they leave him behind, held tight in his mother's arms.
In 1954, Gore Vidal adapted "Barn Burning" into an episode of the same name for the CBS anthology series Suspense, starring E. G.
[3] In 1958, Martin Ritt directed a film titled The Long, Hot Summer featuring actor Paul Newman.
"[5] In 1985, a made-for-television remake of The Long, Hot Summer aired on NBC, starring Don Johnson.
[3] The 1995 Malaysian adaptation titled The Arsonist (Malay: Kaki Bakar) was made by director U-Wei Haji Saari.
The Snopes family being post-Civil War farmers are instead rewritten as Javanese immigrants who had just moved into a new rubber plantation.