Oxford, MS

Oxford, Mississippi — the reading here, pending cross-check with the register's separate "University" heading, since the university's campus post office is officially University, Mississippi (a note for the registry) — named itself for the English original in frank hope of getting the state university, and got it: Ole Miss opened in 1848, and town and gown have been inseparable since. The campus carries the weight of 1962, when James Meredith's enrolment as the first Black student required federal troops to overcome a riot — a turning point of the civil-rights era, marked today by his statue walking calmly toward the Lyceum's bullet-scarred columns.

Literature gave Oxford its second immortality: William Faulkner lived at Rowan Oak, his cedar-shaded Greek Revival house preserved with his outline of A Fable pencilled on the study wall, and transposed Oxford and Lafayette County into Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha — the postage stamp of native soil on which he built a Nobel Prize. The Square still keeps faith with him: Square Books, spread over three buildings, is one of America's great independent bookstores, and the balconied courthouse square hosts a literary life dense enough for a capital. Football Saturdays in the Grove, blues country beginning just west — Oxford is the South's contradictions, beautifully bound.