A new Mississippi Writers Trail marker honoring internationally recognized literary scholar, editor, and professor Noel Polk has been unveiled at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Polk, a Picayune native, is widely remembered as a preeminent William Faulkner scholar. Polk’s editing, essays, books and teaching provided understanding of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ellen Douglas, Robert Penn Warren and Barry Hannah. He spent his career at the University of Southern Mississippi and Mississippi State University and edited both “The Southern Quarterly” and “Mississippi Quarterly” scholarly journals.
He also co-founded the William Faulkner and Eudora Welty Societies. The organizations are dedicated to scholarships, research, and community around the lives and legacies of the two legendary Mississippi authors.
Polk lectured about Faulkner and Mississippi’s culture throughout Europe, the former Soviet Union, Japan, Canada and the United States. He was a founding member of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, which now awards the Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement Award.
In addition to his critical studies, Polk wrote “Outside the Southern Myth,” his “anti-memoir,” which challenged stereotypes about the South and examined his Mississippi upbringing within the broader context of American life. He died August 21, 2012.
“The Mississippi Writers Trail gives us another meaningful way to tell Hattiesburg’s story through the people and places that have shaped Mississippi’s cultural identity,” Visit Hattiesburg CEO Marlo Dorsey said. “Noel Polk’s connection to Southern Miss and his influence on Southern literature make this marker an important addition to our destination and to the broader story we share with visitors.”
Polk’s published works included Faulkner’s Requiem for a “Nun: A Critical Study,” “An Editorial Handbook for William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” “Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work,” “Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury,” and “Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner.” His honors included the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award and the Texas Review Press Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Mississippi.
The Mississippi Writers Trail pays tribute to Mississippi’s cultural heritage by honoring the state’s most acclaimed and influential writers. Administered by Visit Mississippi, the statewide initiative features markers commemorating the birthplaces, homes, gravesites, museums, and literary locales of Mississippi writers, inviting visitors to experience their legacy firsthand.
