New Albany: Where Faulkner Began

The town you're passing through, New Albany, is the birthplace of William Faulkner , born William Cuthbert Falkner here on September twenty-fifth, eighteen ninety-seven, in Union County, Mississippi. His family moved forty miles southwest to Oxford when he was five, and Oxford became the model for his fictional Jefferson, seat of Yoknapatawpha County. But the land that shaped his imagination , the hills, the rivers, the soil , was rooted here in the northeast corner of the state.

New Albany was founded in eighteen forty at the crossing of two Chickasaw trade trails on the Tallahatchie River. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in nineteen forty-nine. The Union County Heritage Museum keeps a literary garden here, planted with species mentioned in his novels.