Faulkner had no training or visible prospects; he showed little interest in hard work; he did not know what to make of himself; and he shared the vague discontent that was felt by other sensitive young men home from the war. But he could not release this feeling as the other sensitive young men did. The Left Bank, the New York literary world, political radicalism-- these seldom stirred his interest and never satisfied his needs. The land to which he had returned was itself like an old battlefield striped by scars of war, and its people seemed still to be living with a flawed but cherished past. The evidence of his early novels suggests that to Faulkner the two wars, the old war of his homeland and the recent war in Europe, had a way of melting into one desolation. And perhaps most disturbing of all, the South of the twenties was changing in ways difficult to specify but immediately felt. The traditional sense of Southern homogenity was cracking. The agrarian economy was being pierced by salients of industrialism, though not yet in Faulkner's part of the country. And while the South was more prosperous than it had been for decades, a young man of Faulkner's reflective bent might feel uneasy about the new faces that were rising to the social top, faces he would later draw with bitterness and dismay in Jason Compson and Flem Snopes.