After Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers…

— Carl Clinton Van Doren

I grew up in Mississippi being told it was a great place, but not feeling that. When I finally began reading seriously, literature showed…

— Richard Ford

“Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her…

— Mark Twain

“Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and there discovered was a whole world to conquer that…

— Oprah Winfrey

As I grew older I began to realize that Mississippi really wasn't that bad. The basis for progress has always been there. And the…

— Mike Espy

I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping…

— Natasha Trethewey

“The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier…

— Rinker Buck

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

— Ross Douthat

“(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers…

— Howard Kerr

“Things have come a long way in Mississippi. That’s the usual shorthand. Perhaps nowhere else in America has made more progress in its race…

— Richard Grant

“Now, however, Cooper’s romanticism was a receding memory, a newly muscular America replacing it with a post–Civil War vision of Manifest Destiny. The old…

— Bob Drury

“Great Migration. It would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so…

— Isabel Wilkerson