"It was just noon that Sunday morming when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man."

"It's all now you see. Yesterday wont be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin..."

" 'Now what?' his uncle said. 'What are you waiting for now?'
'My receipt,' Lucas said"

From the dust jacket of the first edition:
"William Faulkner's seventeenth volume, his first novel to be published since The Hamlet in 1940, searches the conscience of the South. It is a study of murder and the mass mind, of an accused Negro whose guilt or innocence becomes secondary to the larger moral problems of justice itself, of a boy just old enough to find his way into manhood under the stress of conflicting values, of a community suspended momentarily between instinctive decency and bestial, irrevocable action. It is a story of man in his essential nobility but on the verge of repudiating himself in all his reprehensible weakness. In the few fateful hours while a mob gathers, two lads and an old woman search for the truth that may free not only the accused but the community itself. How the find it and all that is revealed to them make far more than a story of suspense and mystery; their discovery, and the rapt reader's too, is a new insight into the relationship between the dominant and the dominated. Intruder in the Dust is a major American novel, distinguished for its penetration, subtlety and gripping narrative power."