"Red Leaves" is a short story by American author William Faulkner. First published in the Saturday Evening Post on October 25, 1930, it was one of Faulkner's first stories to appear in a national magazine. The next year the story was included in These 13, Faulkner's first collection of short stories.
"Red Leaves" has been described as "a vision of the inexorable, brutal pattern of nature that decrees that every living thing must die". When writing the story, Faulkner is thought to have been influenced by Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway. The title of the story symbolizes the American Indian, specifically the Chickasaw:
The red leaves referred to the Indians. It was the deciduation of nature that had suffocated, smothered, destroyed the Negro. The red leaves had nothing against him when they suffocated him and destroyed him.
— William Faulkner
Read more about Red Leaves: Plot Summary
Famous quotes containing the words red and/or leaves:
“The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America.... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.”
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