However, the town began to suspect that he had acquired his wealth illegally, and on the day he became engaged to Ellen, he was arrested, though later bailed out by the Coldfields. He lived a wild life until, one day, he came into town to court Ellen Coldfield he suddenly ceased his wild ways, dedicating himself to her family. He began clearing the land and building Sutpen’s Hundred.

He would disappear for long periods of time, once returning with a large number of slaves. Sutpen was initially regarded as a mystery, a man who took rooms in town and somehow purchased his land with Spanish gold. Quentin’s father tells the same story with a vastly different tone.

On Judith’s wedding day, her brother Henry killed her fiancé in front of the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred. Rosa implies that she believes the South lost the Civil War because it was led by men like Sutpen, whom God wished to punish. Sutpen, marrying Rosa’s older sister Ellen in a bid for social status, has two children, Judith and Henry. Rosa tells Quentin that Sutpen was a savage, awful man who forced his slaves to fight for his amusement, sometimes taking part in the fights. Rosa’s description of Sutpen is dark and foreboding, describing him consistently as a devil or demon. He established a thriving plantation there and seemed poised for wealth and influence. Sutpen arrived in the area in the 1830s and acquired the land on which Sutpen’s Hundred was built through devious and possibly illegal means. The story opens on the night before Quentin is to depart for Harvard he is summoned to the dark, hot home of family friend Rosa Coldfield, who tells him her version of the story of her brother-in-law, Thomas Sutpen. In his novel Absalom, Absalom (1936), William Faulkner traces the rise and fall of antebellum Southern culture by following the life story of a single man, using a mixture of equally unreliable narrators.

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