The Reivers

The Reivers by William Faulkner, published in 1962, is a picaresque comic novel set in early 20th-century Mississippi. It follows eleven-year-old Lucius Priest, who joins his family’s employee Boon Hogganbeck and the shrewd Ned McCaslin on an impulsive borrowing of the grandfather’s new Winton Flyer automobile for a trip to Memphis. Their adventure spirals into a whirlwind of mishaps, including a bordello stay, a horse race scam, moral quandaries, and encounters with vice, ultimately serving as Lucius’s coming-of-age tale amid themes of innocence lost, racial dynamics, and the clash between tradition and modernity.