Editing Light in August (section)

=== Major characters ===
[[File:Rex theatre.jpg|thumb|Segregated movie theater in [[Leland, Mississippi]], in 1937, a result of [[de jure]] segregation of black and white people in the South]]
* Lena Grove &ndash; a young pregnant woman from Alabama who has traveled to Jefferson while looking for Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child.
* Byron Bunch &ndash; a bachelor who works at the planing mill in Jefferson, who meets and falls in love with Lena when she arrives in town. She has been told that a man named Bunch works at the mill and assumes it is Lucas Burch, because the name sounds similar.
* Gail Hightower &ndash; the former minister of Jefferson, forced to retire after his wife was discovered to be having an affair in Memphis and committed suicide. He is a friend and mentor to Byron.
* Lucas Burch/Joe Brown &ndash; the young man who fathered Lena's child in Alabama and ran away when she told him she was pregnant. He has been living in Jefferson with Joe Christmas in a cabin on Joanna Burden's property under the name Joe Brown and working with Christmas and Byron at the planing mill. He is also a bootlegger.
* Joe Christmas &ndash; a man who came to Jefferson three years prior to the events in the novel. He lives in a cabin on the property of Joanna Burden and has a secret sexual relationship with her. Although he has light skin and is an orphan with no knowledge of his family background, he believes that one of his parents is of African-American ancestry, and this secret has caused him to be a habitual wanderer. He is employed at the planing mill until he begins to make a profit as a bootlegger.
* Joanna Burden &ndash; the sole survivor in Jefferson of a family of abolitionists from [[New England]] who came to Jefferson after the [[Civil War in the United States|Civil War]]. She is unmarried, lives alone in a manor house outside of Jefferson, and is secretly engaged in a sexual relationship with Joe Christmas. She is murdered, presumably by Christmas, at the start of the novel, and her house is burned down.