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Crisis in the Flesh. Faulkner's developing alarm over the grim daily realities of race in the present-day South was best demonstrated in three notable character portraits (one Negro, two white) he painted in Intruder in the Dust, which was his first novel in seven years when it was published in 1948. Lucas Beauchamp (rhymes with reach 'em) is what the local whites violently resent as a "damned high-nosed impudent Negro." As the book opens, he is about to be lynched for murdering a white man. He proves himself a model of imperturbable courage that any civil rights leader should envy.
Lawyer Gavin Stevens, whom Beauchamp calls on to defend him, is the very picture of the well-meaning but ineffectual white moderate who is reluctant to act on his convictions. Faulkner's belief that the coming generation carries the burden and opportunity of reconciliation is personified in Chick Mallison, the white lad who digs up the evidence that clears Beauchamp. Chick is torn between the tradition that expects him to hate Beauchamp for his prideful independence, and his own grudging, slowly growing respect for Lucas as a man. More explicitly than any other of Faulkner's books, Intruder in the Dust is the South's racial crisis given flesh.
Walked Off the Page. But Faulkner is finally relevant not narrowly to the Negro problem in the South but to the white problem—the ills of the entire society and way of life he writes about. In his Snopes trilogy, starting with The Hamlet, he turned to another aspect of that society, telling of the grimly independent small white farmers and the rise of that perfectly unprincipled man Flem Snopes.
Flem Snopes and his rootless clan are a Faulkner creation that rose up and walked off the page. Throughout the South today, "Snopes" is a derisive epithet for men ranging from leading demagogic politicians down to the Klansman next door. Snopeses pop up early in Yoknapatawpha County, but unlike most other Faulkner characters they seem to have no ancestors—at least not from Mississippi. Flem's father, the vicious Ab Snopes, wore neither blue uniform nor grey, but was a carrion crow on Civil War battlefields.
Flem rises because he has no humanity to blur the cold, hyper-rational clarity with which he uses other people's weaknesses. When he outgrows the back country and moves to Jefferson (in The Town and The Mansion), his tribe begins to infiltrate and increase. There is Montgomery Ward Snopes the pornographer, Wat Snopes the carpenter, Virgil Snopes the barber and brothel athlete, and a score of others. When Flem takes over the Sartoris Bank, his success is proof of the loosened grip of the older, principled families.