Rowan Oak

William Faulkner was born in nearby New Albany in 1897 and grew up in Oxford, the town that would become the center of his fictional world. In 1930 he bought a decaying Greek Revival house on the edge of town, built in the 1840s, and set about restoring it while he wrote. He named it Rowan Oak after the rowan tree of old folklore, said to bring peace and protection, and he lived there through the most productive years of his career.

It was at Rowan Oak that Faulkner wrote or revised many of his masterworks, the novels and stories that map the rise, fall, and entanglements of families across his invented Yoknapatawpha County. Though his fiction ranged across the whole human condition, its raw material was the land, speech, and history right around this house, and the home remains inseparable from the imagination that flowered inside it.

The most famous room in the house is Faulkner's ground-floor study, and its walls hold one of the great treasures of American literary history. While writing his novel A Fable, Faulkner mapped the plot out in pencil and red grease crayon directly on the plaster, day by day, so that the outline of the book still runs around the room. It is a rare and moving window into the working mind of a great writer.

The rest of the house is kept much as the Faulkners lived in it, from the furniture and the writer's typewriter to the everyday objects of a mid-century Mississippi home. Nothing is staged for grandeur; the appeal is intimacy, the sense of walking into the rooms where the work was actually done and the family actually lived.

Rowan Oak sits within grounds that are part of its magic, approached down an avenue of eastern red cedars planted long ago, with woods and trails extending behind the house. Faulkner loved these grounds and cared for them himself, and the shaded paths and the surrounding trees echo the landscapes that fill his fiction, the deep woods, the hunting country, and the old plantations of his imagined county.

The University of Mississippi, which owns and preserves the property, keeps the grounds open for visitors to walk. A stroll through the cedars and into the woods is as much a part of the experience as the house itself, offering the same quiet that the writer sought and drawing a straight line between the land and the literature it inspired.

Oxford lies in the hill country of north Mississippi, in the ancestral homeland of the Chickasaw people, whose towns and hunting grounds covered this region before their removal in the 1830s. That history is part of the deeper story of the land Faulkner wrote about. The town grew up around its courthouse square and the University of Mississippi, and it has become one of the South's most celebrated literary and college towns.

A visit to Rowan Oak pairs naturally with the rest of Oxford. The historic square, with its courthouse, bookstores, and restaurants, is a short distance away, as is the university campus with its museums and Faulkner's grave in the town cemetery. Together they make Oxford a rewarding stop for anyone drawn to Southern literature, history, and the enduring life of a small university town.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.