The Princess Guide to Rome by Belinda Darcey

The courthouse square is the center of both Oxford and Jefferson. Oxford now has 10,000 people, 18,500 counting the university. The dry-goods stores have been replaced by boutiques and the town's two cotton gins turned into restaurants. Shopping malls and fast-food restaurants cluster around the bypass exits. This core remains, but around it new subdivisions of ranch-style homes have grown up. They lived along tree-shaded streets laid out around a courthouse square. In Faulkner's day Oxford had fewer than 5,000 people. Oxford has changed since then, in the way a town changes over two decades. In 1864 the town was burned by federal cavalrymen.įaulkner died in 1962. Grant moved through in 1862 Bedford Forrest later headquartered his Confederate troops there. During the Civil War, Oxford was fought-over terrain. It was given its name by settlers who hoped a state college would be built there-a hope fulfilled in 1848, when the University of Mississippi was established just outside town. Oxford, 60 miles southeast of Memphis, was founded in 1836 on land purchased from the Chickasaw Indians. No one writes about Faulkner without using such phrases as 'tradition,' 'history' or 'sense of the past.' Lafayette County (pronounced La-fay-ette) gave him his subject.

The town he called Jefferson is its county seat, Oxford. The real-life setting he apotheosized into Yoknapatawpha is Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote, he said, by making the actual apocryphal. Mention the name and you summon up images: courthouse square, back-country hamlet, sharecroppers' shacks along a gravel road, silent hunters waiting in a shadowy forest. The 14 novels he set there, from 'Sartoris' in 1929 to 'The Reivers' in 1962, made it the most famous county in American literature: Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. William Faulkner called it his little postage stamp of native soil.

The Princess Guide to Rome by Belinda Darcey