One of America's most beloved authors and a master of the personal essay, Willie Morris (1934–1999) wrote nineteen books and hundreds of articles and reflections. To honor his memory on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth (November 29, 1934), My Two Oxfords is a special edition of one of these choice essays. In this piece, he addresses the quirky circumstance of having lived in “two of the world's most disparate places.” There were two Oxfords in his life—Oxford University in England, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1950s, and Oxford, Mississippi, the home of the University of Mississippi, where he was writer-in-residence when he wrote the essay. Among the obvious contrasts between the two places, Morris finds complexity: “The legendary beauty of the Ole Miss coed is not myth. The girls of Oxford, England, so stringently screened by some of the world's most demanding academic requirements, were often dour; yet the occasional warm-spirited beauty among them was always worth the waiting. . . . By the same token, the intellectual Ole Miss sorority girl of good and gentle disposition is a joyous song in the heart and will endure.” This essay is quintessential Morris—lyrical and evocative, a blend of personal experience and memory, history, a strong sense of place, and a bit of whimsy. A foreword by JoAnne Prichard Morris and a photograph by David Rae Morris make this edition a must-have for Willie Morris's many fans.
In 1970 Brown v. Board of Education was sixteen years old, and fifteen years had passed since the Brown II mandate that schools integrate "with all deliberate speed." Still, after all this time, it was necessary for the U.S. Supreme Court to order thirty Mississippi school districts--whose speed had been anything but deliberate--to integrate immediately. One of these districts included Yazoo City, the hometown of writer Willie Morris. Installed productively on "safe, sane Manhattan Island," Morris, though compelled to write about this pivotal moment, was reluctant to return to Yazoo and do no less than serve as cultural ambassador between the flawed Mississippi that he loved and a wider world. "I did not want to go back," Morris wrote. "I finally went home because the urge to be there during Yazoo's most critical moment was too elemental to resist, and because I would have been ashamed of myself if I had not." The result, Yazoo, is part reportage, part memoir, part ethnography, part social critique--and one of the richest accounts we have of a community's attempt to come to terms with the realities of seismic social change. As infinitely readable and nuanced as ever, Yazoo is available again, enhanced by an informative foreword by historian Jenifer Jensen Wallach and a warm and personal afterword on Morris's writing life by his widow, JoAnne Prichard Morris.
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