There is a palpable connection to the landscapes of Mississippi displayed in the work of the state’s many lauded writers. This connection to the land runs deep—across onerous lines of class, gender, and race—and spans generations of authors birthed in the Magnolia State. It’s difficult to read Faulkner, Welty, Wright, and Ward and not come away with the very particular sense of place that the state and the greater American South represent in their work.
In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks takes readers on a visionary tour of the real and imagined landscapes that have inspired generations of authors. Eubanks is a native Mississippian and he knows its writers and its complicated history well. In A Place Like Mississippi, Eubanks reveals how a little state that rests alongside the banks of a great and mighty river has made so many significant contributions to American letters, carrying an outsized role in the national imagination. The answer lies in a landscape that pairs ordinariness with beauty, magic with madness, and mystery with magnificence.
