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

“This 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 whole.