Mississippi’s unmatched literary history sets us apart as an ideal destination for bookworms and aspiring writers from around the world. The Mississippi Writers Trail, managed by the Mississippi Arts Commission, was launched in 2018, and along with it, an updated literary map sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council. It clearly shows the vast number of authors and playwrights from the Magnolia State who have impacted the literary world.
Literary buffs take note—when making travel plans through the Delta, take time to explore the people and places that put the region on the literary map. The Mississippi Writers Trail debuted on the State Capitol grounds in Jackson, Mississippi at the 2018 Mississippi Book Festival. It honors our state’s acclaimed authors, and highlights the notable places that helped shape their lives and influence their renowned works. It’s no surprise many of the markers are in the Delta, our rich heritage widely known to have inspired some of the state’s most prolific writers and playwrights. Even the works of prominent Mississippi writers not raised on our Alluvial soil—including famed literary greats William Faulkner and Eudora Welty—were influenced by the history and lore of the Delta. The most recent installation honors celebrated author and entertaining connoisseur Julia Reed. We’ve chosen some of our region’s markers to guide you as you plan your next Delta road trip.
JULIA REED
Installation: October 20, 2023
Wetherbee House
Julia Reed (1960–2020) of Greenville was not only a prolific writer but truly an ambassador of the Delta. Her varied career took her to places far and wide, but her heart remained here, and her beloved home was often the inspiration for her editorial pieces. She was known for her irreverent take on politics and for finding humor in the human condition, particularly in the South. Her vast subject matter also included her love of art, decorating, food, and fashion, and she was a master at finding humor in the human condition. Reed authored several books and cookbooks, including Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena, South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land, and Julia Reed’s New Orleans: Food, Fun, and Field Trips for Letting the Good Times Roll. She was a longtime editor and writer for Vogue. Reed had articles and stories published in numerous other magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and her popular column in Garden & Gun magazine. True to her Greenville roots, she revitalized the Delta Hot Tamale Festival, a cornerstone event in her hometown, where she spent much time and always kept a home.
Wetherbee House
503 Washington Avenue, Greenville
ENDESHA IDA MAE HOLLAND
Installation: June 13, 2023
Emmett Till Square at Rail Spike Park
Born in Greenwood, Ida Mae Holland (1944–2006) experienced great hardship and abuse as a child. Overcoming those childhood atrocities, Holland eventually earned her high school equivalency diploma, left Mississippi, and enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, and earned a bachelor’s degree in African-American Studies followed by a master’s degree in American Studies in 1984 and a Ph.D. in American studies in 1986. She was very active in the Civil Rights Movement, traveling the country, teaching the movement’s history in Mississippi, and speaking out against the atrocities she had experienced in her own life. Although she was named Ida Mae after her mother, she later gave herself the name “Endesha,” a Swahili word meaning “to steer.”
A noted scholar and dramatist, Holland was the author of six plays. She was most famous for writing From the Mississippi Delta, chronicling her journey from poverty and prostitution in the Jim Crow South to civil rights activism, a Ph.D., and an academic career. It was performed by the Negro Ensemble Company at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and at the Young Vic in London. Holland also wrote a memoir of the same name, published by Simon & Schuster in 1997.
Emmett Till Square at Rail Spike Park
The corner of Howard Street and Johnson Street, Greenwood
DOROTHY SHAWHAN
Installation: July 23, 2021
Kethley Hall, Delta State University
A Tupelo native, Dorothy Shawhan (1942–2014) was an outstanding educator, leader, and writer. She earned degrees from the Mississippi State College for Women, Louisiana State University, and George Mason University. She began teaching at Delta State University in Cleveland in 1981, and she chaired the Division of Languages and Literature from 1991 to 2006. An accomplished author and scholar, Shawhan published many articles in literary and scholarly journals. She authored numerous books, including the widely read novel Lizzie, based on the life of a Mississippi governor’s daughter, as well as Fannye Cook: Mississippi’s Pioneering Conservationist, Spirit of the Delta: The Art of Carolyn Norris, and she coauthored the biography, Lucy Somerville Howorth: New Deal Lawyer, Politician, and Feminist from the South. Her marker reads, “Enlivened by a sense of humor and a wild imagination, her stories could conjure up Faulkner’s ghost or depict contemporary pilgrims telling tales on a trip to Memphis.” During her tenure at Delta State, Shawhan received the Kossman Teaching Award and was also the co-founder of a literary journal, Tapestry, that publishes faculty work at Delta State.
Kethley Hall, Delta State University
1003 West Sunflower Road, Cleveland
ELIZABETH SPENCER
Installation: October 5, 2019
Merrill Museum, Carrollton Courthouse Square
Novelist Elizabeth Spencer (1921–2019) was born in Carrollton, an old Mississippi town on the eastern edge of the Delta. She had a natural interest in writing from early childhood and kept herself company early on by writing adventure stories. Spencer was valedictorian of her high school graduating class, and went on to attend Belhaven College in Jackson and she majored in English, graduating in 1942. During her senior year as president of the literary society, Spencer invited Eudora Welty to be the society’s guest. It was after receiving encouragement from Eudora Welty, whom she met while at Belhaven, that Spencer went on to obtain a master’s degree from Vanderbilt University and began a long career of teaching and writing award-winning fiction. Her third novel, The Voice at the Back Door, a graphic depiction of racial strife, was one of her most notable works. But her scope was quite broad, with her subsequent work, The Light in the Piazza, set in Italy. Spencer has authored nine novels, five collections of short stories, a memoir, and a play, and she mastered all these forms. She won numerous awards over her nearly seven-decade career, including the William Faulkner Medal for Literary Excellence and the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Achievement in Literature.
Merrill Museum, Carrollton Courthouse Square
601 East Jackson Street, Carrollton
MARY GARRARD
Installation: July 3, 2023
Henry Seymour Library
Mary Garrard (born 1937), an Indianola native, is an art historian and has had an exceptional career. After earning her bachelor’s degree at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, she received a master’s degree at Harvard University and her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, where she wrote her dissertation on “The Early Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino—Florence and Rome.” She has also co-edited four books on feminism and art history that have become essential texts in American universities, and she is recognized as one of the founders of feminist art theory. She is particularly known for her work on the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Her publications include Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art, Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy, and Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe. She has lectured extensively on Renaissance art, feminist art, and feminist issues in universities, colleges, and museums across the country, was one of the leaders of the feminist movement in art professions, and was the second national president of Women’s Caucus for Art.
Henry Seymour Library
201 Cypress Drive, Indianola
RICHARD FORD
Installation: September 2, 2021
Carnegie Public Library
Richard Ford (1944), a Jackson native, is a novelist and short story writer. He won acclaim with his first two novels, A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck. Ford has stated that his interest in literature developed despite having mild dyslexia, and believes his diagnosis may have helped him as a reader, as it forced him to read books slowly and thoughtfully. His first collection of short stories, Rock Springs, established his as a master of the genre in 1987. Through his career his works have earned many honors and worldwide recognition. His novel The Sportsman was named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 novels published since the magazine’s inception. He wrote his highly acclaimed The Sportswriter while living in rural Coahoma County, and he used the book’s protagonist, Frank Bascombe, in future novels including Independence Day, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996. In Spain, he garnered their prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for 2016. Recently, his novel Wildlife was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name, and in 2023 Ford published Be Mine, his fifth work of fiction chronicling the life of Frank Bascombe.
Carnegie Public Library
114 Delta Avenue, Clarksdale
SHELBY FOOTE
Installation: October 18, 2019
E.E. Bass Cultural Arts Center
Shelby Foote (1916–2005) a writer, historian and journalist, was born in Greenville. His family was deeply rooted in Mississippi. He was a lifelong friend of fellow Greenville novelist Walker Percy, and drew deeply on the Southern heritage into which he was born. Foote and Percy both attended The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Foote wrote for the university’s literary magazine. He left Chapel Hill without graduating and, following time in the military, returned to Greenville. His first of five works of fiction, Tournament, was published in 1949. Foote primarily viewed himself as a novelist, but he is best known for The Civil War: A Narrative, his expansive three-volume history of the American Civil War, which made him a foremost authority on the subject. This ensured that, additionally, he will forever be remembered as a historian. Foote also made his mark as a charismatic commentator, appearing in the Ken Burns miniseries documentary, The Civil War, which first aired in 1990. Until that time he was little known to the general public but it is where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was “central to all our lives.”
E.E. Bass Cultural Arts Center
323 South Main Street, Greenville
WILLIE MORRIS
Installation: June 4, 2022
Triangle Cultural Center
Born in Jackson, Willie Morris (1934-1999) spent a magical Yazoo boyhood playing pranks and baseball with his dog and friends or playing “Taps” on his trumpet for military funerals. Yazoo City figures prominently in much of Morris’s writing, his talent evident when he was very young, as evidenced in pieces he wrote for the local and school newspapers. As a student at the University of Texas, he was editor for the Daily Texan and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University in England. He was editor for the Texas Observer and became the youngest-ever editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine in New York. In 1980, Morris returned to Mississippi to become writer-in-residence at Ole Miss, where he was revered by the students in his writing classes in Oxford and was known for his wit and warm sense of humor. Morris later lived in Jackson. Notable among his twenty-three award-winning books are North Toward Home, Yazoo, and My Dog Skip, which was also made into a popular motion picture by the same name. When Morris died on August 2, 1999, his body lay in state at the Old Capitol.
Triangle Cultural Center
332 North Main Street, Yazoo City
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Installation: October 17, 2019
Cutrer Mansion
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, but he considered the Mississippi Delta his home, particularly Clarksdale, where he and his family spent a significant amount of time during his childhood. Some of his greatest dramas were filled with Delta characters and memories of the region. He was sickly as a child and had a turbulent family life, the themes of which are also evident in his future works. His passion for writing began as a teenager. Throughout college, he began submitting his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests, hoping to earn extra income. After college, he became a playwright, discovering his love of theater while studying drama in New York. He adopted Tennessee Williams as his professional name, acknowledging his Southern accent and Delta roots. Williams is considered among the foremost playwrights of twentieth-century American drama. His dramas, including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, are among the most acclaimed dramas ever performed on Broadway. Several have been adapted into motion pictures, which catapulted his reach to audiences worldwide.
Cutrer Mansion
109 Clark Street, Clarksdale
WALKER PERCY
Installation: October 18, 2019
E.E. Bass Cultural Arts Center
Walker Percy (1916–1990) was born in Birmingham, Alabama. Orphaned in late childhood, he and his brothers were adopted by his elder cousin, William Alexander Percy, a poet and patron of the arts from Greenville, Mississippi. W. A. Percy, a poet and author in his own right, wrote the bestseller Lanterns on the Levee and was also honored on the Mississippi Writers Trail with a marker that has yet to be installed. Through his youth in the Percy home, Walker was introduced to a world he would have never known and became lifelong friends with fellow writer Shelby Foote. After earning a medical degree from Columbia University, Percy contracted tuberculosis and, while convalescing, read fervently, questioning humanity’s purpose. Subsequently, he gave up pursuing a medical career and began writing in earnest. In 1961, he published The Moviegoer, his first novel, which received the National Book Award for Fiction. Percy continued to write fiction, nonfiction, and essays, many dealing with human struggles with identity, spirituality, and behaviorism, with characters who struggled to find meaning in their existence. His works include six novels, two nonfiction books, and numerous scientific and philosophical essays, which have ensured him a firm place in American literature.
E.E. Bass Cultural Arts Center
323 South Main Street, Greenville
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Installation: October 10, 2019
Rowan Oak
William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962) was born in New Albany but moved to Oxford as a child. Winner of the 1949 Nobel Peace Prize, he made an indelible mark on American literature. Although he grew up in Oxford, the Delta figures prominently in Faulkner’s works. Likewise he greatly influenced many Delta writers. Many of his works were set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which literary scholars believe encompasses the Delta. The novel The Bear evokes the Delta’s wilderness at the time; his writings show Faulkner’s experiences hunting along the Tallahatchie River, the time spent in Clarksdale, and with lifelong friends such as Ben Wasson of Greenville.
His mark on American and Southern literature is undeniable. His works have become classics, including Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and many more. Faulkner won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for two of his works, A Fable in 1954 and The Reivers in 1962, the year of his death. He is the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. His beloved Oxford home, Rowan Oak, and the surrounding grounds are maintained by the University of Mississippi and are destinations for literary and southern historians alike.
Rowan Oak
916 Old Taylor Road, Oxford
