Faulkner on the Gulf: The Pascagoula Summer House

William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Oxford, Mississippi, returned more than once to the Gulf Coast to write. At this house in Pascagoula, he sat beneath an oak tree in the yard, working through scenes and stories while the Gulf air moved around him. Faulkner was famously rooted in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County of northern Mississippi, but the Gulf Coast drew him back more than once.

He reportedly fell for a local Pascagoula woman during one of these stays, a detail the marker preserves alongside the literary work. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in nineteen forty-nine, and his novels including The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are cornerstones of American fiction. Sources disagree on whether his novel Mosquitoes was written in Pascagoula in the summer of nineteen twenty-six, but the marker places him writing in this yard, which makes it worth a pause.