Sanctuary

Sanctuary is a 1931 novel by American author William Faulkner. The book, set in Faulkner’s fictitious Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, follows the fall of a well-to-do college girl named Temple Drake at the hands of a bootlegger named Popeye. Popeye’s rape and abduction of Temple has many outward repercussions during the two months the novel depicts, affecting the lives of local lawyer Horace Benbow, bootlegger Lee Goodwin, and Gowan Stevens, Temple’s date, whose actions lead to her kidnapping. Supposedly published purely for financial reasons, the book was well received upon publication, even if the reviewers often found the subject matter of the book horrific. Both a crime fiction novel and an example of the Southern Gothic genre for which Faulkner is known, the novel explores themes that include the loss of innocence, the impact of social pressures, and the decline of the South through vice.

The book was adapted into the 1933 movie The Story of Temple Drake. Faulkner would go on to write a sequel to Sanctuary, Requiem for a Nun, 20 years later in 1951.