"The Reivers" was a departure for William Faulkner. Published in 1962, it was the last novel he wrote before his death.

Faulkner made a name for himself with a writing style that features stream-of-consciousness outpourings, complex sentence structures, and narratives that jump back and forth in time – a style that often made his works difficult to read. "The Reivers" contains none of these features. It is a straightforward, linear coming-of-age story, told in the first person.

Lucius Priest is eleven years old at the time of the story, which is presumably told years later by an adult Lucius. While the boy's family is out of town for a funeral, he travels from Mississippi to Memphis with his family's employees, Boon Hogganbeck and Ned McCaslin, in a car they "borrowed" from Lucius's grandfather. Boon initiates the journey to visit his girlfriend, a Memphis prostitute. Along the way, the trio trades the car for a horse, enters the horse in a race, and attempts to win enough money to buy back the car. Along the way, they repeatedly get themselves into and out of trouble, including several run-ins with the law, before returning home.

The experience changes Lucius, who learns about responsibility, consequences, and the relations between blacks and whites in the early twentieth-century American South.

Although "The Reivers" is an easier read than most of Faulkner's novels, it is still a thought-provoking story, told with humor and sentiment.