A father and son's eloquent portrait and personal evocations of modern Mississippi

An exerpt from the book:

-Through the years two of the most singular extremes have been the desire, on the one hand, to dwell forever with all the myths and trimmings of a vanished culture which may never have truly existed in the first place, certainly not the way we wished it to, and the frantic compulsion, on the other, to reforge ourselves as an appendage of the capitalistic, go-getting, entrepreneurial North. . . . Between these two extremes there have been complex lights and shadings, and...

A father and son's eloquent portrait and personal evocations of modern Mississippi

An exerpt from the book:

-Through the years two of the most singular extremes have been the desire, on the one hand, to dwell forever with all the myths and trimmings of a vanished culture which may never have truly existed in the first place, certainly not the way we wished it to, and the frantic compulsion, on the other, to reforge ourselves as an appendage of the capitalistic, go-getting, entrepreneurial North. . . . Between these two extremes there have been complex lights and shadings, and...

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...