Faulkner’s Mississippi is a unique intersection of Southern literature and modern photography. Commissioned to capture the essence of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, William Eggleston—a pioneer of color photography—traversed the landscape of Oxford and Lafayette County, Mississippi. His 75 color plates avoid the literal, instead capturing the atmospheric “spirit of place” through mundane details: rusting gates, vibrant local flora, and the peculiar quality of Southern light. These images are interwoven with an expansive essay by Willie Morris, who provides a personal and historical meditation on Faulkner’s legacy. The book is not merely a biography of a writer or a place, but a “third thing” created by the dialogue between Morris’s nostalgia and Eggleston’s unsentimental, democratic lens. It documents a Mississippi that remains haunted by its past while vibrantly present in the color of the now.
