Faulkner was unwilling in his own life to adequately acknowledge the evils of slavery and segregation, but he did so with savage thoroughness fiction. In 19 36, the same year that margaret mitchell offered the world a romance between rep butler and scarlet o'hara, faulkner published a story of rape and incest and races terror called Absalom. Falkner's is brutalizing, depicting a south debased by degeneracy and then by the refusal to atone for it.