Recommendations
Books Like Go Down, Moses
Best books to read after Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner
Go Down, Moses is Faulkner's most concentrated treatment of race, inheritance, and the moral burden of Southern history — seven linked stories about the McCaslin family across generations in Yoknapatawpha. If the novel's moral seriousness and its portrait of how the sin of slavery persists through time moved you, these books share its concern with what history costs those who inherit it and its conviction that the past cannot be escaped without being confronted.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's masterpiece about slavery's aftermath is the most important contemporary American novel to engage with the historical material Faulkner approaches in Go Down, Moses — the same concern with how the dead continue to haunt the living, and the same conviction that the history of slavery cannot be processed without being fully acknowledged; where Faulkner approaches it through white narrators, Morrison approaches it through the experience of those who suffered
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The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
The essential companion in the Yoknapatawpha cycle — the Compson family's disintegration told through four radically different perspectives; the two novels approach the same concerns (race, inheritance, the burden of Southern history) from different angles, and together they constitute the most complete portrait of the moral world that slavery created and destroyed
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Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
The companion piece to Go Down, Moses in Faulkner's treatment of Southern history — both approach the legacy of race and inheritance across generations, but Absalom is organized around Thomas Sutpen's white dynasty while Go Down, Moses is organized around the McCaslin family's tangled racial lineage
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The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
Jones's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Black slaveholder in antebellum Virginia is the most formally Faulknerian of recent American novels — multiple time frames, large cast across generations, the same concern with inheritance and the moral burden of ownership; Jones acknowledged Faulkner as his primary literary model for The Known World
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The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an enslaved woman's journey north through a literal underground railroad engages with the same historical material as Go Down, Moses but from the perspective of the enslaved rather than the slaveholding family; the most recent major American novel to continue the tradition of Morrison, Jones, and Faulkner on American slavery
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Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's National Book Award-winning novel about Milkman Dead's journey into his family's Southern history — the most direct Morrison parallel to Go Down, Moses in its concern with how a man in the present recovers and confronts the history embedded in his family's past; both novels move from the present into a reconstruction of history that changes what the present means
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Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Butler's science fiction novel about a contemporary Black woman who is repeatedly pulled back to the antebellum South is the most powerful speculative fiction engagement with the same material Go Down, Moses addresses through historical realism; both are about what it costs people to be implicated in the history of slavery, whether as descendants of slaveholders or as people who must survive it
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A Mercy
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's novel about the beginnings of racialized slavery in 17th-century North America — the earliest period of the institution that Go Down, Moses's characters inherited — is the Morrison novel that most directly complements Go Down, Moses's concern with inheritance and origins; the most historically foundational of her novels about American slavery
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