Clarksdale received some national attention on Tuesday, May 1, in an article in The New York Times highlighting Mississippi’s literary trail.
As the article stated, William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize in 1949 for his textured examination of aristocratic decay in small-town Mississippi. Eudora Welty was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom for her novels and essays. More recently, the National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward explored the dark moodiness of race and poverty along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.
The trio and a host of other literary standouts will be celebrated along the newly named Mississippi Writers Trail. This month, the Mississippi Arts Commission received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to set up a series of markers across the state to honor the contributions of its most prominent writers.
The article, written by Laura M. Holson, talked of Pulitzer Prize award winner Richard Ford and whether he wanted to commemorate his childhood home in Jackson.
“Mr. Ford, though, had other ideas. In the mid-1980s, the novelist, a former sportswriter, lived in Clarksdale, a small town in the Mississippi Delta 150 miles from Jackson.
“There, he spent days at the Carnegie Public Library writing ‘The Sportswriter,’ his 1986 novel about a failed fiction writer turned sportswriter whose son dies. (He followed it up with the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘Independence Day’ in 1995.) In the end, Mr. Ford wanted his marker at the library in Clarksdale, not his childhood home.
“The Delta is where I chose to live,” Mr. Ford said. “Carnegie Library is a refuge. They offered me a haven. I want to be remembered in a place where people could go read books. Literature can be a way for society to address what it doesn’t want to address.”
