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Faulkner's low-class characters had but few counterparts in earlier Southern novels dealing with plantation life.

They have an ancestry extending back, however, at least to 1728, when William Byrd described the Lubberlanders he encountered in the back country of Virginia and North Carolina.

The chief literary antecedents of the Snopes clan appeared in the realistic, humorous writing which originated in the South and the Southwest in the three decades before the Civil War.

These narratives of coarse action and crude language appeared first in local newspapers, as a rule, and later found their way between book covers, though rarely into the planters' libraries beside the morocco-bound volumes of Horace, Mr. Addison, Mr. Pope, and Sir Walter Scott.

There is evidence to suggest, in fact, that many authors of the humorous sketches were prompted to write them -- or to make them as indelicate as they are -- by way of protesting against the artificial refinements which had come to dominate the polite letters of the South.

William Gilmore Simms, sturdy realist that he was, pleaded for a natural robustness such as he found in his favorites the great Elizabethans, to vivify the pale writings being produced around him.

Simms admired the raucous tales emanating from the backwoods, but he had himself social affiliations which would not allow him to approve them fully.

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, a preacher and a college and university president in four Southern states, published the earliest of these backwoods sketches and in the character Ransy Sniffle, in the accounts of sharp horse-trading and eye-gouging physical combat, and in the shockingly unliterary speech of his characters, he set an example followed by many after him.