Lion’s Den.

Water Valley-Taylor-Oxford-Sardis Lake-New Albany-Ripley

A literary lion, winner of the Nobel… A notorious big game hunter and photographer, who filmed the very first motion pictures of African wildlife… A courageous scholar and leader who stepped into a maelstrom and faced down a violent mob to claim equal rights for all. A legendary politician shot to death by his own business partner in the middle of town; another who gave a passionate and eloquent eulogy for a former enemy to lay to rest a generation of hatred and bitterness.

That’s how people are here in Faulkner Country: bigger, braver, striding across the pages of fiction or straight into the annals of history, like Casey Jones barreling his train through here on his way to immortality. 

No wonder this place has been turning out best sellers for more than a century. Writers flock here to write about it, artists are drawn to depict it, scholars come to study it. Yet while modern times have tamed the darker nature of this larger-than-life region, there’s just no way it can ever be truly captured. Even Faulkner admitted he couldn’t do it in a lifetime.  There’s that much to discover…

Tallahatchie, Yalobusha, Yacuna—the names betray the native origins of this “native postage stamp of soil.” (According to some scholars, Yoknapatawpha is a variant spelling of Yacuna.) Whites began to settle here in the 1830s, and in 1841, the state’s first university was founded here, its home city named Oxford in high hopes of what was to come. Unfortunately, what was to come was Civil War. Grant camped in Oxford, Grierson rode through Ripley so fast he didn’t even have time to scorch the earth, a company of young students, the University Greys, marched off to Gettysburg and perished, every single one. In 1864, Union soldiers set fire to Oxford’s courthouse and town square. And while the conflict ended at Appomattox, the issues at stake were never really resolved until the Ole Miss riots at James Meredith’s enrollment, what some have called “the last shots of the last battle of the Civil War.”

In the meantime, there were myths to be made, local history to be mined for every glorious detail. And the man to do it was born at the “tale end” of the 19th century to a family well nigh as colorful as any that he would eventually commit to fiction. William Falkner (as his name was spelled then) had only to look around at his family and his neighbors to see real-life models both for his characters and for himself—railroad tycoons, best-selling novelists, big-game hunters, noble leaders and murderous scoundrels, all side-stepping along a racial chasm that stretched a dark maw just beneath the social landscape.

This is Faulkner Country, rich, rolling bottomland where tall tales and vivid stories take root and grow. Your own story begins in Water Valley, where one of the tallest tales of all just happened to be true.