V. K. Ratliff
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V. K. Ratliff is the sanguine sewing machine salesman in William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy of novels.
He mainly sells sewing machines, but also on occasion parlor organs, radios, and televisions. He grew up on a farm his father rented from Anse Holland, and was a neighbor of the Snopes family. He had a partnership with a cousin (variously named Aaron Rideout in The Hamlet and Grover Cleveland Winbush in The Town) in a sidestreet cafe in Jefferson, which he lost to Flem Snopes.
He lives with his sister and her family in Jefferson. He was descended from a Russian mercenary in the British Army during the American Revolution, who was sent to Virginia when Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga, escaped and was kept hidden by a girl named Nelly Ratcliffe, on whom he fathered a child. No one knew his last name, but his first and second were Vladimir Kyrilytch, and a son in each generation bore those two names. The child was the Ratcliffe who went to Mississippi at the time Samuel Habersham, Louis Grenier, and Alexander Holston did, and was the ancestor of the sewing machine salesman, V. K. Ratliff. Ratliff appears in A Bear Hunt, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion under that name.
In Sartoris/Flags in the Dust, As I Lay Dying, and the stories "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" and "Centaur in Brass," both later rewritten, he is called V. K. Suratt. Faulkner changed the name to Ratliff because there was an actual person named Suratt.
