About 6 h 30 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 13 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest leaves Mississippi for Memphis in his grandfather’s stolen automobile, persuaded into the trip by family employee Boon Hogganbeck. Ned McCaslin, who also works for the family, stows away. At Miss Reba’s brothel, Lucius encounters an adult world his family has kept from him, while a supposedly lame racehorse entangles the travelers in gambling, horse smuggling and trouble with the law.
Reader notes
The comic adventure unfolds as an elderly Lucius tells his grandson about his boyhood. His adult recollections run through the boy’s bewilderment, so the literary coming-of-age story carries two perspectives at once: youthful discovery and an older man’s understanding.
How it reads
Writing style
Conversational · Descriptive · Witty
Tone
Humorous · Playful · Reflective · Warm
Structure
Framed · Linear
Driven by
Character · Plot · Relationships
Point of view
First person
Setting
Memphis · Mississippi
Reading complexity
Writing
3 / 5
Ideas
3 / 5
Structure
3 / 5
Background knowledge
2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Writing
How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas
How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure
How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge
Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity
Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
Class
Coming of age
Freedom
Friendship
Inequality
Morality
Content notes
Violence
Mild
Sexual content
Mild
Swearing
Mild
Substance use
Mild
Abuse
Mild
Self-harm or suicide
None
Standing and awards
Canonical
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1963
Library of America
Author: Nobel Prize in Literature, 1949
Questions readers ask
How long is it?
320 pages in the Vintage 1992 paperback edition.
Which edition is shown here?
Vintage · 1992 · Paperback. ISBN 9780679741923.
How long does it take to read The Reivers?
About 6 hours 30 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 320-page Vintage edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
William Faulkner
William Faulkner made the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the setting for an exacting body of novels and stories about families, communities, and the burdens of Southern history. His fiction ranges among poor white laborers, Black Southerners, and declining aristocratic households, with particular attention to racial violence, class, religion, inheritance, and thwarted ambition. Faulkner’s characteristic methods are structural as much as verbal. Dense, carefully cadenced prose follows memory and obsession through stream of consciousness, abrupt shifts in time, and narrators whose accounts remain partial or unreliable. In The Sound and the Fury, the Compson family’s collapse emerges from several radically different perspectives, forcing chronology to be reconstructed from fragments. As I Lay Dying distributes a family’s funeral journey among fifteen narrators, exposing conflicting motives within a shared undertaking. Absalom, Absalom! pushes this method further as Quentin Compson and others repeatedly revise the story of Thomas Sutpen’s ruined dynasty, making conjecture and inherited testimony part of the novel’s account of slavery and patriarchal power.
