Sartoris is a novel, first published in 1929, by William Faulkner. It portrays the decay of the Mississippi aristocracy following the social upheaval of the Civil War. The 1929 edition is a cut version of the novel published in full as Flags in the Dust in 1973. Faulkner's great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, himself a colonel in the American Civil War, served as the model for Colonel John Sartoris.