Oxford, Mississippi: Faulkner, The Square & Southern Cooking

William Faulkner's home, preserved exactly as he left it on the morning of July 6, 1962 — two days before he died. Walk the cedar-lined drive through the old growth, through the front door, and into the study where the outline of A Fable is still written in pencil directly on the plaster walls. The house is modest, the grounds are shaded and unhurried, and the experience of standing in the room where The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying were written is quietly extraordinary.

Lunch at John Currence's flagship on The Square — the restaurant that put Oxford on the national food map and has held it there for three decades. The shrimp and grits is the signature: head-on Gulf shrimp over stone-ground grits with tasso gravy, a dish that shows up on every best-of-the-South list. The upstairs balcony looks directly onto The Square and the courthouse; weekend lunch here feels like the center of Oxford social life. Reserve ahead for weekend visits — walk-in waits can be long on game days and market Saturdays.

One of America's great independent bookstores, spread across three floors of a 19th-century building on The Square — the main store for new books, Off Square Books down the street for remainders and children's titles, and Square Books Jr. for young readers. The signed-first-edition shelf and the Faulkner section alone justify the trip; the reading series has brought nearly every major American author through Oxford.

Walk the shaded campus centered on The Lyceum — the Greek Revival antebellum administration building that was at the center of the 1962 integration crisis when James Meredith enrolled as the first Black student, triggering a federal intervention that required 31,000 National Guard troops. The building is serene now, surrounded by old oaks, and the walk across the Grove (the famous tailgating grounds) and past the Ford Center completes the picture of this complex, beautiful university town.