Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

You grew up in the midst of that.
Correct. I was thirteen when Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.

As someone who's spent most of his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?
My view of the community is essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would say, I really appreciate all the people who work for the city. A lot of good public servants.

When you talk with writers about places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that's because this is Faulkner country—his house is here, and his grave is here, and so on—but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last several decades?
You know, it's a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark Young was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young. And primarily because of the presence of the university, there's always been something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner's major work dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately, and because of the mythology he created, that makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn't quite do that with Oak Park. It wasn't a little native postage stamp of soil. And in Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.

More recently, Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store. He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of] Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He was hired by Harper's Magazine to be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in chief. And while at Harper's, he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism. He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer's "Armies of the Night" [originally titled "Steps of the Pentagon"], the longest magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.

He also wrote a book called North Toward Home, which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the South 'cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was going on.

That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or quit Harper's, depending on the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation, believing that he wouldn't accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner's niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the bookstore. He said, "Richard, I'm going to bring all these writers, all my friends. I'm going to bring them down here and they're going to do book signings at your store and we're going to have a great time."

The summer I came back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from Vicksburg; he'd been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South's being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen pregnancy and all the things we're still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October 1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore. So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not a book-signing tour. They didn't go to bookstores. We weren't by any means the first store to do this, but there weren't many who were doing this at the same time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that's kind of how the circuit business got started.

Then Barry Hannah moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing style particularly contrasted with Willie's. Because Willie, he was kind of a journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American letters at that point. There would've been kind of a rivalry with any writer, any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with Faulkner's ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile period in the community's literary history.

So that convergence of events helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.
Right, right. And then, you know, Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.

Had John been living here the whole time too?
No, he'd been living in north Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That's when John said, "Wow, I'm gonna do something with this."