Based on a Faulkner short story, "Tomorrow" reappeared in the author's 1949 short story collection Knight's Gambit. The original story is the tale of a lonely farmer, Jackson Fentry, who becomes the foster father to a young baby who he names "Jackson and Longstreet." After a few years, the birth family returns to claim the child who grows into a mean bully named Buck Thorpe. In the process of trying to run off with a young girl, Thorpe is killed by her father, Homer Bookwright. Ironically enough Fentry is one of the jurors in the ensuing trial against Bookwright. Fentry hangs the jury because he cannot forget the baby he once knew and loved.

The road to the film Tomorrow was a long one - Faulkner himself at one time played with the idea of developing the story into a screenplay. But the first to pen the story for film was Horton Foote, the Oscar-winning screenwriter for To Kill a Mockingbird. Foote had experience adapting Faulkner on the small screen with the teleplay for Old Man (1958). In 1960, Tomorrow appeared live on the CBS Playhouse 90 series and proved extraordinarily popular. This success prompted well-known stage director, Herbert Berghof, to co-write a theatrical production of the work with Foote.  The play opened in 1968 with a little-known actor named Robert Duvall playing the lead. Two film producers in the audience on opening night decided to make a film using Foote's screenplay and Robert Duvall.

Hearing about the project, a Tupelo woman wrote to the producers to suggest her hometown as a film location, and the producers decided to adopt her suggestions as the north Mississippi area contained many of the necessary exterior sites.

Despite a limited distribution, the film was a critical success. Critic Rex Reed proclaimed it, "a film that stands majestically among the best American films." Gene Shalit wrote that, "Tomorrow is one of the year's ten best films...It is the screen's best Faulkner ever."