The Mississippi Writers Trail pays tribute to the state’s most acclaimed and influential writers through a series of historical markers that recognize the importance of place in an author’s life while educating the public about the history and legacy of Mississippi writers.
Richard Nathaniel Wright was born in Roxie, near Natchez, in 1908.
In his youth, he suffered poverty, racism, and being shuffled between
an orphanage and the homes of relatives. In Jackson, he was
valedictorian of his class at Smith Robertson . . . — — Map (db m193094) HM
Born in Carrollton in 1921, Elizabeth Spencer aspired to be a writer
early on. After receiving encouragement from writer Eudora Welty,
whom she met while attending Belhaven College in Jackson, Spencer
obtained a master's degree from Vanderbilt . . . — — Map (db m170313) HM
Born in Jackson in 1944, Richard Ford won critical acclaim with his
first two novels, A Piece of My Heart (1976), and The Ultimate Good Luck
(1981). While he and his wife, Kristina Ford, lived in rural
Coahoma County, Ford wrote The . . . — — Map (db m235140) HM
Williams famously remarked that "home is where you hang your childhood", and for the world renowned playwright, that place was the Mississippi Delta, specifically Clarksdale, where he set some of his greatest dramas, including Summer and . . . — — Map (db m154862) HM
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the French Legion of Honor, Eudora Welty typically drew upon her native state for the settings of her fiction. Mississippi's hill country, its Natchez Trace and Delta, Welty's . . . — — Map (db m133916) HM
Born July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, Margaret Abigail Walker
grew up in a sophisticated Black family in New Orleans. After
attending Northwestern University, she joined the WPA in Depression-
era Chicago, where she met some of the day's . . . — — Map (db m178376) HM
Winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, William Cuthbert
Faulkner was born in New Albany on September 25, 1897, and moved
with his family to Oxford as a child. He made an indelible mark on
American letters by bringing a modernist literary . . . — — Map (db m219907) HM
Holland was born August 29, 1944, in Greenwood. Named Ida Mae after her mother, she later gave herself the name “Endesha,” a Swahili word meaning “to steer,” an ideal description for the driven social activist, educator and prize-winning . . . — — Map (db m229045) HM
Born to slave parents in Holly Springs on July 16, 1862, Wells' life
epitomized the freedom struggle for African Americans following the
Civil War. When her parents and an infant brother died in the Yellow
Fever outbreak of 1878, Wells raised her . . . — — Map (db m169992) HM
Young was born October 11, 1881, in Como. In 1897, two years after
his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, he enrolled at the University of
Mississippi. He would receive his B.A. there in 1901, and an M.A.
degree from Columbia University in New . . . — — Map (db m235142) HM
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was born November 17, 1916, in Greenville.
A childhood friend of Mississippi novelist Walker Percy, he began
his early career as
an author publishing five works of fiction.
Foote, however, will forever be remembered as a . . . — — Map (db m157703) HM
Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, orphaned in
late childhood, and adopted at age thirteen by kinsman William Alexander
Percy, a poet and patron of the arts from Greenville, Mississippi.
After acquiring an MD degree from . . . — — Map (db m157650) HM
A heroine of the Civil Rights Movement, Anne Moody was born
in 1940 in Wilkinson County near Centreville. In her classic 1968 memoir,
Coming of Age in Mississippi, she lucidly and eloquently articulates
what it was like to grow up in . . . — — Map (db m193106) HM
Born in Jackson in 1934, Willie Morris spent a magical Yazoo boyhood playing pranks and baseball with his dog and his friends or playing "Taps" on his trumpet for military funerals. His writing talent was evident early on in pieces he wrote for the . . . — — Map (db m213946) HM
