When Intruder in the Dust was published in 1948, it was William Faulkner's first book to appear since Go Down, Moses in 1942. During that six-year period, Faulkner's literary reputation experienced a remarkable reversal of fortune. Although he had been held in high critical esteem throughout the1930s and had even graced the cover of Time magazine on January 23, 1939, his books began going out of print in the early to mid-1940s. In some cases the very plates on which those books were printed had been melted down for war material. Then, in 1946, the general reading public rediscovered the Mississippi novelist with the publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner – a selection of fiction set in the author's mythical Yoknapatawpha County. In editing this volume, Cowley paid scant attention to the formal distinction between stories and excerpts from novels. Believing that Faulkner (1897–1962) was less the careful craftsman than the grand mythmaker, Cowley arranged the contents of his book according to narrative chronology, giving us a history of Yoknapatawpha County over a period of two centuries.

Faulkner's newly acquired fame (which included his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950) coincided with the birth of the postwar civil rights movement in America. Two months before Intruder in the Dust was published, the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia had split over the party's stand on race.