This novel, by Nobel Prize-winning William Faulkner, was published in 1948. It focuses on Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer accused of murdering a white man. He is exonerated through the efforts of black and white teenagers and a spinster from a long-established Southern family. It was written as Faulkner's response as a Southern writer to the racial problems facing the South. In his Selected Letters, Faulkner "the premise being that the white people in the south, before the North or the Govt. or anybody else owe and must pay a responsibility to the negro." It was made into an MGM film of the same name in 1949