Founded in 1835 as the seat of Lafayette County, Oxford was named for the university town of Oxford, England, an echo intended to inspire Mississippi’s legislature to locate the state’s first university here, which it did in 1844. William Faulkner long made his home in Oxford, where he failed as a postmaster but succeeded so well as a novelist that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. The town, with its courthouse and square, served as the model for his literary town of Jefferson, and Lafayette County became his mythical Yoknapatawpha, where he set most of his novels, beginning with Sartoris (1929).
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