Satire, Tragedy, Coming-Of-Age, Adventure
Well, genre is a bit hard to pin down with this seven-story-long not-quite-novel, not-quite-short-story-collection of a book. Random House first published it in 1942 as Go Down Moses and Other Stories, much to Faulkner's chagrin. Faulkner was patching together several different short stories, to be sure, but he was of the opinion that he was writing a novel, even if it might be a different kind of novel. So before its second publication, he made sure to write to his publisher to say, "Moses is indeed a novel," and got Random House to remove "and Other Stories" from the title.
Because the book is made of loosely connected episodes with their own separate genres, we'll name the genres here: "Was" is a satire, with Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy's bachelor caricatures and Miss Sophonsiba's screaming and single-lady scheming. "Pantaloon in Black" is a tragedy. (Check out our "Plot Analysis" for more on that.) "The Old People" is a classic bildungsroman—a fancy term for a coming of age story about a boy learning to be a man and initiated into the rites of manhood (in this case, hunting).
"The Bear" is also a coming of age story, as Isaac enters the hunt as a naïve boy and emerges as a man thanks to the mentoring of Sam Fathers. It's also part adventure story, but it's more than just an adventure about hunting a big bear. Its fourth section chronicles the end of slavery in the South.
In fact, you could also call parts of this book historical fiction, although the reader sure has to work through pages and pages of obscure and confusing description to tease out the historical events themselves. Taken all together, the book gives us a pretty broad survey of the post-Civil War era as well as a peek back to antebellum slavery.
In another way, the book is a family drama about five generations of McCaslins. So, how to describe a book that contains elements of adventure, history, philosophy, family drama, satire, tragedy and probably some other genres? And that jumps between them freely and without notice to the readers? We'd call it "modernist."