That earlier novel mentions the man who replaced Colonel Sartoris in command of the Confederate regiment from Jefferson, but never names him.

The southern past had been a focus of Faulkner's imaginative project from the beginning of the Yoknapatawpha fictions in many ways Absalom can be read as a revision, or at least a reconsideration, of the way his first Yoknapatawpha novel (published as Sartoris and in Digital Yoknapatawpha as Flags in the Dust) evokes the figure of the slave-owning planters who presided over the Old South. Quentin Compson and his father, major figures in this novel, first appeared in The Sound and the Fury (1929) Caddy Compson is never mentioned in Absalom, but Faulkner wrote his publisher that he decided to 'use' Quentin's 'bitterness' about his sister to provide a particularly incisive state of mind with which to engage the history of the South.

Sutpen first appeared in print in 'Wash,' which Faulkner wrote in the fall, 1933 he re-used much of that short story in Chapter 7 of the novel, though by that point Sutpen's story was much more complex. In the early summer, 1931, he wrote 'Evangeline,' a short story about the Sutpen family and Charles Bon, whom Judith marries and Henry kills with 'the last shot fired' in the Civil War Faulkner had no luck selling the story to the magazines and it remained unpublished until after his death, but many of its narrative and thematic elements anticipate the novel. Faulkner began writing Absalom, Absalom! in February, 1934, but its imaginative origins stretch back through several different works almost to the imaginative genesis of Yoknapatawpha.

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