OXFORD, Mississippi—America’s greatest novelist, a longtime resident of this lovely college town, once wrote:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

William Faulkner wrote that in “Requiem for a Nun,” one of his lesser-known novels. Like all his work, the book experimented with narrative techniques. Parts of it are told in prose infused with the author’s poetic sensibility. Other sections are presented as if they were a play.

All that experimentation, though, focuses on Faulkner’s overriding obsession, his quest to figure out how we come to terms with what we have done and what has been done to us.

How we make peace with the past.

Faulkner’s emergence nearly a century ago as a great writer represented a sharp break with the main branch of Southern fiction.

Prior to his arrival, most books about the South glorified what had gone before, overlooking or even revising the bigotry, the violence and the poverty that plagued the region. In the hands of Southern romantics, the Civil War was not a horrible American tragedy brought on by a wretched crime against humanity—human slavery—in which brothers, cousins and fellow citizens slaughtered each other by the tens of thousands, battling in mud and blood for four long years while disease after disease ravaged the troops, but a gallant struggle waged by selfless and courtly gentlemen.

The South’s apologists even denied the true cause of the war, saying that it was a fight for self-determination, one waged so the Confederacy could be “left alone.”

In fact, President Abraham Lincoln had pledged to the Southern states that they would be left alone, but that didn’t stop them from firing the first shot in the murderous conflict that nearly tore the world’s great experiment in self-government apart.

Faulkner lifted the rock on Southern evasions and hypocrisies, revealing profound truths about race, regret and epic wrongs in the process.

His tales were not those of courtly noblemen defending a sacred lost cause but of desperate people doing often cruel and venal things for reasons that were far from selfless. He was one of the first white Southern writers to treat Black characters as fully functioning human beings. This allowed him to probe the tragic realities of segregation and the high price the South paid for living with and upholding the lie that some people deserve rights of liberty and personal self-determination … and some don’t.

Faulkner’s truth-telling was often met with hostility and contempt in his native land. Scorned as “Count No’Count” for his often patrician dress and manner, his neighbors here in Oxford showed little regard for the genius in their midst.

Even as Faulkner developed a worldwide reputation as one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century, most of his townsmen considered him an embarrassment, a bizarre little man with an odd penchant for unsavory things.

They preferred the lie to the truth.

Now, as I walk through the rooms of Faulkner’s home and amble through the streets of the town where he lived, I think about how history echoes through eternity, how now distant struggles that have lain dormant may suddenly spring to life again.

We once again are amidst a great forgetting. States across the nation now are in the middle of a campaign to rewrite and obscure history once more, erasing grave injustices from the American consciousness and memory by banning books and suppressing any acknowledgment of basic truths.

In one particularly fatuous and vicious instance, the Republican governor of Florida who is also a presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, has tried to repackage slavery—human servitude imposed by force of arms—as a kind of vocational education experience, a benign benefit rather than a cruel curse.

Now, as in Faulkner’s time, many Americans prefer the lie to the truth.

William Faulkner died a little more than 60 years ago, leaving behind the richest body of work ever produced by any American who ever picked up a pen.

He now is a writer more often admired than read, perhaps because his books make demands of both concentration and conscience on his readers.

This is a pity, because what he had to say is as timely now as it was 100 years ago.

We Americans still must come to terms with what we have done as a nation and a people.

Because the past is never dead.

It’s not even past.