A Chicago-born young African-American man pays the ultimate price for speaking a few words in French to a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi in the 1950s.
The shaky marriage between Henry McAllan and his city-bred wife Laura becomes even more unstable when his brother Jamie returns from World War II in 1946 to help work the family's miserable cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, along with his comrade-in-arms Ronsel Jackson, the oldest son of local sharecroppers, who soon learns that his heroics in battle mean nothing in the Jim Crow south.
The first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, telling of the arrival of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi in the aftermath of the Civil War, and of the shady Flem Snopes's swift rise to power in the small town.
Describes the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans in Mississippi, from the time of slavery to the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Traces the history of this ancient trail used originally by Native Americans, describes its use by travelers returning north from New Orleans, and includes information about it as a national reserve.
The life of Jewel Hilburn, a mother living with her husband and children in the backwoods of Mississippi in 1943, undergoes a drastic change when her sixth child, Brenda Kay, is born without the gift of common sense.
Tonya Hailey is brutally raped, beaten and left for dead by two drunken and remorseless men. After they are caught, Tonya's father shoots them and then must stand trial.
Harvard freshman Quentin Compson tries to piece together the strange story of Thomas Sutpen, an ambitious planter whose plans to build a dynasty in Mississippi in 1833 go tragically wrong.
Mamie Till-Mobley discusses the effect on her life of the murder of her son, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman, and tells how she was able to go on after his death to become a teacher and an activist in the civil rights struggle.
