His friend Ben Wasson was the model for Horace Benbow, while Faulkner's brother Murry served as the antetype for young Bayard Sartoris.

Colonel John was a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War, built the local railroad, and is a folk hero.

That and the family disposition for foolhardy acts push him into a pattern of self-destructive behavior, especially reckless driving in a recently purchased automobile.

Full of enthusiasm, Faulkner sent Flags in the Dust up to Horace Liveright (who had published his first two novels) in New York.

Despite the adversity Faulkner had faced, he still believed that this would be the book that would make his name as a writer, and for several months he tried to edit it himself, sitting at his worktable in Oxford.

On September 20, 1928, Faulkner received a contract for the book, now to be called Sartoris (no one knows who changed its name), which was to be about 110,000 words long, and which was to be delivered to Harcourt, Brace sixteen days later.

But when he sat down in Wasson's apartment to observe the operation on his novel, Faulkner found himself unable to participate.

As he later wrote of his third novel, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."

For the next two weeks, while Faulkner sat nearby writing The Sound and the Fury, Wasson went through the typescript of Flags in the Dust, making cuts of every sort until almost a fourth of the book had been excised.

It was also the immediate predecessor of some of his most famous and critically acclaimed novels The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary and Light in August.

[3] Contemporary reviews, however, were mixed; while appreciating Faulkner's writing style, they stressed the book's seeming lack of consistency and its loose plot.