![]() It was given its name by settlers who hoped a state college would be built there-a hope fulfilled in 1848, when the University of Mississippi was established just outside town. Oxford, 60 miles southeast of Memphis, was founded in 1836 on land purchased from the Chickasaw Indians. No one writes about Faulkner without using such phrases as "tradition," "history" or "sense of the past." Lafayette County (pronounced La-fay-ette) gave him his subject. The town he called Jefferson is its county seat, Oxford. The real-life setting he apotheosized into Yoknapatawpha is Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote, he said, by making the actual apocryphal. Mention the name and you summon up images: courthouse square, back-country hamlet, sharecroppers' shacks along a gravel road, silent hunters waiting in a shadowy forest. ![]() The 14 novels he set there, from "Sartoris" in 1929 to "The Reivers" in 1962, made it the most famous county in American literature: Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. William Faulkner called it his little postage stamp of native soil. ![]()
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