Lucius Hogganbeck

First introduced into the canon as Lucius (Luke) Provine in the short story "A Bear Hunt" (1934), where he is a major character, he recurs in the last two novels in the Snopes trilogy and The Reivers as Lucius Hogganbeck. As Provine, he is forty years old and almost toothless, a hanger-on at the hunting camp, a "tall, apparently strong and healthy man . . . who makes no effort whatever to support his wife and three children" (64), as well as violent, shiftless and boozy. Twenty years earlier he was notorious in the region as the leader of a "gang" of delinquents; one of the gang's actions in that past gives rise to the story's main events. In the trilogy he is not so disreputable: he owns and drives an "automobile jitney" - usually a small passenger bus (The Town, 38). At the very end of The Reivers he is a newborn baby, the son of Boon and Everbe Hogganbeck. Lucius Priest, the old man who narrates that novel's story, says he is "already as ugly as Boon," but that is before he learns that the boy has been named after him: Lucius Priest Hogganbeck (305). It's a very inconsistent biography, and his behavior as Luke Provine in the 1934 short story tarnishes - in typically Faulknerian fashion, i.e. a-chronologically - the apparent happiness of his birth almost three decades 'later' as the ending of The Reivers (1962), but Faulkner confirms that all these characters are the same man in his revision of "A Bear Hunt" for inclusion in Big Woods (1955), where he renamed Lucius Provine "Lucius Hogganbeck."