A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape

nThis is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created. --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American MemoirIn A Place Like Mississippi, award-winning author and Mississippi native W. Ralph Eubanks treats us to a literary tour of the evocative landscapes that have inspired writers in every era. From Faulkner to Wright, Welty to Trethewey, Mississippi has been both a backdrop and a central character in some of the most compelling prose and poetry of modern literature.

The journey unfolds on a winding path, touching the muddy Delta, the rolling Hill Country, down to the Gulf Coast, and all points between. In every corner of the state lie the settings that informed hundreds of iconic works.

Immersing us in these spaces, Eubanks helps us understand that Mississippi is not only a state but a state of mind. Or as Faulkner is said to have observed, To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi. nThis is the book all of us Mississippi writers, dead and alive, need to read. It is indeed a strange but glorious sensation to see your literary and geographic lineage so beautifully and rigorously explored and valued as it's still being created. --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir The South has produced some of America's most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi. Names as diverse as Faulkner, Welty, and Ward have created a literary legacy spanning decades and stretching across lines of class, gender, and race. One thing binds together these wide- ranging perspectives--the land itself. In A Place Like Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks explores those ties and the ways in which the Magnolia State has fostered such a bounty of expression. The stories haven't always been easy to tell; even beautiful landscapes can't obscure a complicated history. The state's African American writers have long recounted the fight for equality, forming a lineage of powerful Black voices that continue to speak with urgency in our tumultuous times. Yet underlying those truths is also a deep affection for Mississippi's places. With the love of a native son, Eubanks pays tribute to the inspiration that can come from the lay of the land, proving that a journey through one state's literary terrain can help us better understand America as a