The Long, Hot Summer was based on the works of southern writer William Faulkner, most notably his 1940 novel The Hamlet.

The Long, Hot Summer was turned into a television series in 1965. It starred Roy Thinnes as Ben Quick, Nancy Malone as Clara, and Edmond O'Brien as Will Varner. O'Brien eventually left the show and was replaced with Dan O'Herlihy. Legendary director Robert Altman directed the pilot.

In 1985 The Long, Hot Summer was turned into a TV movie starring Don Johnson as Ben Quick, Cybill Shepherd as Eula, Jason Robards as Will Varner, and Ava Gardner as Minnie Littlejohn.

Although William Faulkner was best known as a novelist and short story writer, he did work as a screenwriter in Hollywood for 20th-Century-Fox during the thirties and forties. A good deal of his work went uncredited and he was never successful in adapting any of his own work for the screen (although he did do a screen treatment for "Barn Burning" but it was never produced). He did, however, receive credit for the screenplay adaptations of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (1944), Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946) and a few other scripts such as Submarine Patrol (1938) for director John Ford and The Road to Glory (1936) for director Howard Hawks.

Other William Faulkner film adaptations include The Story of Temple Drake (1933, based on his novel Sanctuary), Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Tarnished Angels (1958, based on his novel Pylon), The Sound and the Fury (1959), Sanctuary (1961), The Reivers (1969), Tomorrow (1972, based on his story), and an uncredited Russian adaptation of Sanctuary entitled Cargo 200 (2007, aka Gruz 200).

by Andrea Passafiume