Introduction
Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State set out to be more than a road book. As its state director and editor explained in the preface, the volume tried to picture and explain the contemporary state—its people, culture, physiography, politics, folkways, economics, and industry—always in relation to the historical past, and only then to lead the traveler, in narrative detail, from one point of interest to the next. The research turned up incidents in Mississippi’s development as dramatic and colorful as any in fiction, and the editors hoped the book might serve as a springboard for anyone wishing to plunge into the still largely undisturbed waters of what they fondly called Mississippiana.
The emphasis fell deliberately on the typical and the average rather than the exceptional. The Project’s writers argued that the great agricultural majority of the state—more than four-fifths of its population at the time—had been left out of the Mississippi pictured by William Faulkner at one extreme and Stark Young at the other, and they meant to give that majority its place. The difficulties were many: first-hand information often came by word of mouth and had to be checked, source material was not always reliable, and preparing the tours during an active road-building program meant frequent revision.
Writing the foreword as national administrator of the Works Progress Administration, Harry L. Hopkins placed the book within a larger design. Here, he wrote, was a volume that carried the reader vividly into the South in the first period of its greatness and brought him by natural steps up to a contemporary scene in which a new South was in the making. To the visitor, Mississippi offered modern methods of agriculture in the northern Delta, a playground along the Gulf Coast, and some of the finest surviving plantation architecture in Natchez and other historic towns—one more panel, Hopkins noted, in the growing portrait of America that the American Guide Series was assembling state by state.
The guide is organized in familiar parts. General-background essays open with the question “What Is Mississippi?” and move through the natural setting, archeology and the Indians, an outline of four centuries, transportation, agriculture, industry, religion, education, the press, and a closing survey of arts and letters, architecture, and music. “Main Street and Courthouse Square” then portrays Biloxi, Jackson, Natchez, Vicksburg, Oxford, and other towns, before seventeen highway tours—many crossing into neighboring states—trace the highways that bind the Delta, the hills, and the coast together.
Issued by The Viking Press in 1938 under the sponsorship of the Mississippi Advertising Commission, the guide is reproduced here as the Writers’ Project completed it. The foreword, preface, and full table of contents appear exactly as first printed, a document of how Mississippi chose to describe itself during the Depression years.
Contents
Bibliographic Record