Snopes Trilogy, The

a trilogy of novels by William Faulkner, comprising The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959), and dominated by the family which lends its name to the title. In his prefatory note to The Mansion Faulkner speaks of a ‘work conceived and begun in 1925’; among the earliest manifestations of the trilogy are the short stories ‘The Hound’ (the Ernest Cotton of the story becomes Mink Snopes in the trilogy) from 1930 and ‘Spotted Horses’ (generally thought one of Faulkner's greatest comic achievements) from 1931, which was subsequently incorporated into The Hamlet. The trilogy is set in and around Frenchman's Bend and Jefferson (both in the fictitious Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi) and follows the progress of the Snopes family who represent a new kind of South in which greed, profit, and a bogus respectability have replaced the older, more agrarian order.