One summer afternoon in 1932, William Faulkner and his wife Estelle were sitting on the side porch of their home in Oxford, Mississippi.

She said, “Does it ever seem to you that the light in August is different from any other time of the year?”

He said, “That’s it!”, disappeared into the house, and returned a moment later.

“What he had done was to go to his worktable and draw four pen strokes through the title ‘Dark House,'” Estelle wrote later. “Above and slightly to the left he printed ‘Light in August.'”