Intruder in the Dust is a 1948 novel by William Faulkner that examines racism in the American South in the mid-20th century through the tale of a Black man wrongly accused of killing a white man. The novel was adapted into a well-received film in 1949.

This guide is based on the 2015 Vintage edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss racism, enslavement, and death by suicide. In addition, the source text uses the n-word.

Plot Summary

Intruder in the Dust opens with Lucas Beauchamp, an African American man accused of murdering a white man named Vinson Gowrie, being led to jail by the local sheriff. Watching the scene, a white teenage boy named Charles recalls meeting Lucas for the first time. Four years prior to the arrest, Charles was hunting rabbits with his Black servant, Aleck, and another Black boy, when Charles fell off a bridge into a creek. Having pulled himself out, he saw an unknown African American man who demanded that the boys accompany him back to his house. On the way there, Charles remembered an old story and recognized the man as Lucas Beauchamp. Inside Lucas’s cabin, Charles was grateful to dry his clothes and warm himself by the fire. When Lucas offered him dinner, he attempted to refuse but Lucas cut him off before he could do so. Likewise, when Charles offered to pay the man after the meal, Lucas pretended not to see the money Charles was holding out to him and refused payment.

For some time after the incident, Charles’s pride was injured by Lucas’s refusal to take his money. He attempted to repay the supposed debt, even buying Christmas presents for Lucas and his family, only to have his plan foiled when Lucas sent him a present in return. It was not until a couple of years later when Lucas ignored him in the street that Charles felt released from any obligation to the man. However, when he hears of Lucas’s arrest, he feels a lingering sense of duty to help the man. When Lucas asks Charles to fetch his uncle Gavin, a lawyer, he knows he must help. He convinces Gavin to meet Lucas in the jail. However, when they get there Gavin assumes that Lucas committed the murder and proposes only to get his sentence reduced. Later, Lucas asks Charles to go to the cemetery and exhume the body of his supposed victim so he can check the caliber of the bullet used and prove that Lucas is innocent.

Gavin dismisses the request as the lies of a guilty man trying to escape justice. Undeterred, Charles asks Aleck to accompany him to the cemetery. Miss Habersham, an old woman who grew up with Lucas’s wife, offers them the use of her truck. On the way to the cemetery, they hide from an unknown person riding a mule. When they dig up the grave, the body inside is not Vinson Gowrie’s but that of a timber merchant named Jake Montgomery. This is enough to convince Uncle Gavin to visit the sheriff and persuade to unearth the coffin. The sheriff agrees and, while Miss Habersham and Charles’s mother stand guard at the prison, the men go to cemetery.

At the cemetery, they meet Gowrie’s father, accompanied by Vinson’s twin brothers. Gowrie’s father reluctantly orders his sons to dig up the grave. However, they unearth an empty coffin. The sheriff deduces that anyone attempting to dispose of two bodies in such a short amount of time would not have traveled far. They search the nearby woodland and follow a trail to a ditch, where they find Jake Montgomery’s body. Further on, they find Vinson buried in quicksand. The sheriff looks at the wounds and concludes that they were not inflicted by Lucas’s gun, but by a gun like the one owned by Vinson’s brother, Crawford. After returning home, Charles realizes why the Gowrie family and other white people did not try to lynch Lucas: They already knew that Lucas was innocent because Vinson had been killed by his own brother. Charles is disgusted and enraged by the fact that they were happy to let him be arrested or executed.

Charles receives a full account of events from Gavin. Vinson and Crawford had been in business together selling timber but Crawford had been secretly taking some of the timber to sell on his own. Lucas noticed this, so Crawford tricked him into waiting in the woods and then shot Vinson and hid, waiting for Lucas to be found nearby. That way, he was able to kill the brother he had been stealing from and ensure that the witness was blamed for the murder. When he went to dig up his brother’s body, he found Jake Montgomery already exhuming the corpse. Realizing that Jake must be aiming to prove his guilt, Crawford shot him. Later, after Charles, Aleck, and Miss Habersham dug up the grave the first time, Crawford snuck back and removed Jake’s body too. As the novel ends, Crawford dies by suicide in prison while Lucas is released and goes to Uncle Gavin, paying him for his services in pennies.