Eudora Welty is one of America’s greatest writers. When she died in 2001, she left a substantial body of prose — fiction and non-fiction. Literary critics believe her work will become a more and more enduring fixture of the American literary canon, as scholars and readers continue to explore her works in order to understand them better.
In the late 1940s in Indianola, Mississippi, a young man named Riley King was singing and playing guitar with his friends in a group called the “Famous St. John’s Gospel Singers.” They played in churches around the Delta and even went to the stations in Greenwood and Greenville and sang on the radio – they were that good.
On the sweltering afternoon of July 7, 1962, the town of Oxford, Mississippi, paused to pay its final respects to its most famous native son. Winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature, creator of a dense fictional domain modeled largely on Oxford and Lafayette County, William Faulkner had suffered a heart attack and died early Friday morning, July 6, at Wright’s Sanitarium in Byhalia, Mississippi.
From the time Mississippi joined the Union in 1817 until the end of World War II, the Democrats won the state's presidential electoral votes in every election except two. Those exceptions occurred in 1840, when William Henry Harrison carried Mississippi for the Whigs, and in 1872, when the circumstances of Reconstruction virtually guaranteed victory for Republican Ulysses S. Grant.