SNOPES: One of the most pernicious families in all of Faulkner. Led by patriarch (or anti-patriarch) Ab Snopes, a barn-burning sharecropper and former horsethief, the seemingly endless number of Snopes who parade through Faulkner's fiction, most especially in the Snopes trilogy (the novels The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) represent an affront in some ways to the "lost cause" aristocratic ideals espoused by Yoknapatawpha County's leading families, such as the Compsons and the Sartorises. With the planters' decline in wealth and prestige in the decades following the Civil War, the upwardly mobile Snopeses are best exemplified by Ab's son Flem Snopes, whose progress from sharecropper's cabin to town to mansion is charted through the trilogy that bears his name. A partial Snopes family genealogy is available.

Excerpt from William Faulkner on the Web

http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/glossarys.html