Louis Dollarhide. “Rich Detail, Energy, Humor; One of His Strongest Books.” Clarion-Ledger-Jackson (Miss.) Daily News, April 28, 1957, p. 11-C.

They came up the trails from the swamps, down paths from the hills, along roads from God-knows-where, to Jefferson; and they worked and cheated and stole, but they won for nothing could stop them. Their victory was as assured as their rapacity, their vast empty hunger to be fed and filled, was always present.

Readers of Faulkner will recognize “they” as the Snopeses, the pale-eyed, shrewd, omnivorous white trash who move into and up in the world of Jefferson, using and taking the old settlers for their possessions and positions. As Gavin Stevens comments early in The Town “They none of them seemed to bear any specific kinship to one another; they were just Snopeses, like colonies of rats or termites were just rats and termites.”

In The Town Faulkner is returning after seventeen years to a theme first begun in The Hamlet, the chronicling of the Snopes family. Again the central figure, the indifferent patriarch of his immense tribe, is Flem. In the first book of the projected trilogy, Flem, a young man, moved into Frenchman's Bend, the hamlet, and married Eula, the daughter of land-owner Will Varner. This was his start.

In the present book, Flem moves like an irresistible force into Jefferson, the town. This arrival Gavin Stevens calls “the first summer of the Snopeses.” And seen alternately from the point of view of three authorities on the Snopeses, Charles Mallison, who looks and listens, and Lawyer Gavin Stevens, and V. K. Ratliff, who are drawn actively into Snopes affairs, the rise of the family is explored to the final emergence of Flem as president of the bank, deacon, and respectable, if not respected, citizen.