Sanctuary

Sanctuary was published in 1931 by William Faulkner (1897–1961), one of America’s greatest authors and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Originally the novel bore the steamy summary “Ole Miss coed Temple Drake ends up the sex slave of a gangster named Popeye.”

Sanctuary is perhaps Faulkner’s most lurid novel. It follows the trail of the sadistic and sociopathic Popeye, the degraded teenager Temple Drake, and Horace Benbow, an idealistic but dissatisfied lawyer.

Benbow is drawn in when the simple-minded Tommy is murdered on the property of moonshiner Lee Goodwin. The evidence points to Goodwin, who insists he is innocent. Benbow steps in to defend Goodwin. Benbow also rushes to the aid of Goodwin’s common-law wife, Ruby, and their malnourished baby. The novel climaxes in a murder trial that draws all of the characters together.

“This book was written three years ago,” said Faulkner in a later introduction. “To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money. . . . I . . . invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks.”

When he received the galleys for the novel, Faulkner continues, “I saw that it was so terrible that there were but two things to do: tear it up or rewrite it. So I tore the galleys down and rewrote the book . . ., trying to make out of it something which would not shame [his novels] The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying too much and I made a fair job.”

Today, nearly 100 years later, Sanctuary makes for grim but gripping reading. A present-day reader can see that it is much more than a lurid thriller. It is a sharp-eyed portrait of human vice, cruelty, and degradation, especially self-degradation. Sanctuary is a masterful and compelling study of evil—and of the sordidness of evil—written by a novelist of the first rank.