How Do You Tour William Faulkners Rowan Oak?
The Nobel Prize-winning Southern novelist lived, appropriately enough, in an old plantation house. In his works, William Faulkner used his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi as a microcosm for all of society. He felt there was nothing about the human condition he couldn’t learn just outside his front door. Like many of his characters, he was a scion of a once wealthy and powerful Southern family, and in 1930 he bought a run-down old plantation house and set to restoring it–a long drawn-out process considering the precarious state of his finances. Built in the 1840s, it was known as both the “Sheegog Place” and the “Bailey Place,” but Faulkner renamed it “Rowan Oak.” Faulkner worked on and added to the house into the 1950s. Entrance to the house is under a two-story portico with a brick terrace on either side. A front hall and back hall, both with staircases, run through the middle of the house. The back hall did double duty as a music room. To the right of the front hall is the parlor wh
