A father and his five children - four boys and one girl - craft the coffin of their deceased wife and mother to transport it from one end to the other of Yoknapatawpha County in the American South, through a thousand adventures, dangers, and tragicomic incidents, where the filth and inhumanity that shook the South are vividly depicted.

Faulkner wrote this work when he was young (in 1929), working as a night watchman, between midnight and four in the morning, within six weeks. Today it is considered one of the masterpieces of 20th-century American literature.