Adventure; Coming-of-Age; Historical Fiction; War Drama
You want excitement? You get it with The Unvanquished. Its main characters, Bayard and Ringo, are always getting themselves into trouble. Much like an episode of I Love Lucy, but with less chocolate and more actual danger.
A lot of the risky business that the boys get into influences the kind of adults they become. The story, which starts when the boys are just kids and ends when they are grown men, zooms in on key moments that kick them into adulthood, like Granny's death and Bayard's decision not to kill his father's murderer.
The novel was written in the 1930s, long after the Civil War, but the memory of the violence was alive and well in Faulkner's South. The setting is historical, and even though the story is fictional, the events surrounding it and the historical characters are real, making this a great example of historical fiction.
Also, it's impossible to ignore the war, with its booms and blasts, not to mention all the blood in the novel. Pretty much everything that happens is a direct result of the Civil War, so yeah, you could call this a war drama.