The Snopeses are William Faulkner's great study in how a family climbs. They arrive in Frenchman's Bend as sharecroppers behind Ab Snopes, an itinerant horse trader whose habit of burning the barns of men who cross him earns him a permanent sobriquet and no permanent address. Ab and his wife Lennie raise Flem, while his cousins Mink and the intellectually disabled Ike come up alongside him — and within a generation Flem owns the bank in Jefferson. Across The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion, Faulkner traces that ascent as a slow infestation of Yoknapatawpha County, and the genogram is the map of it.
The tree's load-bearing joint is a marriage nobody wanted. Will Varner, the landowner, storekeeper and justice of the peace who effectively is Frenchman's Bend, discovers his daughter Eula is pregnant by Hoake McCarron, who promptly vanishes. Varner and his wife hand Eula to Flem, who is impotent and wants only the land and the name that come attached. The child, Linda, is raised as a Snopes and is not one. Eula takes Manfred de Spain as her lover for years; when Flem forces the affair into the open, de Spain leaves town and Eula kills herself, partly to strip Flem of his hold over her daughter.
The other fracture runs sideways, between cousins. Mink Snopes, who inherited Ab's cornered pride rather than Flem's calculation, kills Jack Houston over a pasture debt and goes to Parchman Farm. Flem declines to lift a finger, then engineers the prosecution of his nephew Montgomery Ward Snopes specifically to get Mink's sentence extended. Mink's wife abandons their two daughters; the girls are left destitute, collateral of a kinsman's arithmetic. Thirty-eight years later Linda — widowed by the Spanish Civil War, deafened by the blast that killed her husband Barton Kohl — manoeuvres the lovesick county attorney Gavin Stevens into securing Mink's pardon, and Mink walks back into Jefferson to shoot Flem.
The trilogy ran from The Hamlet in 1940 to The Town in 1957 and The Mansion in 1959, and Faulkner cheerfully let his own details drift between volumes, so the diagram follows the fullest version rather than any single book. What holds is the shape: an old agrarian order embodied in Will Varner, displaced not by conquest but by patient acquisition, and a family so indifferent to its own that its most ruthless member is finally killed by a cousin he simply could not be bothered to help.
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