In a small village of a mythical landscape of the American South, the action of the first part of William Faulkner's trilogy about the Snopes family unfolds, at the beginning of the last decade of the past century.
The recording of the Snopes chronicle occupied Faulkner from 1927, in the form of short stories, and ended in 1959 with the publication of the third volume of the trilogy.

The author himself had said in an interview: "I had to finish the trilogy before I stopped writing." This phrase also gives the measure of the creator's anxiety who fears he may not manage to record this chronicle, full of sarcasm and irony, of human greed.