Words by Daria Smith
Literary travel is surging in 2026, and the South is its natural epicenter. As travelers trade nightlife for narrative, destinations tied to iconic writers are drawing a new kind of visitor, one fueled by #BookTok and the rise of “readaways,” pilgrimages to the places that shaped the books they love. In the American South, history seeps through the soil and stories live close to the surface.
Oxford, Mississippi
William Faulkner
Faulkner’s family arrived in Oxford in 1902, and he never strayed far for long. He bought Rowan Oak, a Greek Revival home on the outskirts of town, in 1930 and lived there until his death in 1962. Today, it stands frozen in time, his study preserved with the outline of “A Fable” still penciled across the wall in his own hand. The Nobel laureate created an entire fictional county from what he called “this one small postage stamp of native soil.”
Square Books has anchored the town square since 1979, hosting more than 2,000 writers for readings and signings across four storefronts, with a café on the second floor whose balcony overlooks the square. The University of Mississippi campus houses Faulkner’s archives alongside a bronze statue of the writer. It hosts the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference each July, drawing scholars and readers from around the globe.
The Lyric Theatre carries its own Faulkner footnote. The building began as a livery stable owned by his family, later became Oxford’s first movie house, and in 1949 hosted the premiere of “Intruder in the Dust.”
Jackson, Mississippi
Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909 and resided there all her life, turning the rhythms of everyday Mississippi life into Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction. Her Tudor Revival home, tucked into the leafy Belhaven neighborhood, is now a National Historic Landmark open for tours. The garden her mother planted remains, along with her typewriter.
Jackson is also home to the Mississippi Book Festival, an annual literary gathering on the State Capitol grounds, and the Mississippi Museum of Art, where Welty’s photography hangs. But the true pilgrimage for any reader is Lemuria Books, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. The bookstore is one of the finest independent bookstores in the country, and Welty herself was a regular.
The Fairview Inn, a grand 1908 Colonial Revival mansion in Belhaven, rounds out the evening with a literature-themed bar. Floor-to-ceiling antique books line the walls, magnolia trees shade the veranda, and the cocktail menu reads like a syllabus. Conversations run long, and the bourbon flows generously. Order yours with just a “splash of wahtah,” the way Welty did, and you might feel her ghost settle into the leather chair beside you.
Monroeville, Alabama
Harper Lee and Truman Capote
Few literary friendships have shaped American letters quite like that of Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1926 and raised there. Capote arrived as a young child to live with relatives next door. The two became inseparable, a tomboyish lawyer’s daughter and a sensitive, precocious boy the other kids couldn’t quite figure out. Lee would base the character of Dill Harris in “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Capote. He would base the character of Idabel Thompkins, at the heart of “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” on her. They would later travel to Kansas together to report what became “In Cold Blood.”
Andalusia is open for self-guided tours, and two peafowl reside in an aviary on the grounds, a nod to the more than 40 peacocks O’Connor raised there, the subjects of her essay “The King of the Birds.” Georgia College’s Ina Dillard Russell Library maintains O’Connor archives—open to the public by appointment, but the library requires at least two weeks’ notice.
The historic Cline-O’Connor-Florencourt House, where O’Connor spent her formative years absorbing the characters and contradictions that would define her work, still stands on Greene Street amid the downtown historic district. Its Greek Revival architecture and layered antebellum history define the streets that gave her Southern Gothic style its unsettling texture. O’Connor’s grave at Memory Hill Cemetery is often marked with a feather left by a passing reader.
McClellanville, South Carolina
Archibald Rutledge
Tucked between Charleston and Georgetown along the Lowcountry coast, the preserved shrimping village of McClellanville was home to Archibald Rutledge. South Carolina’s first poet laureate penned more than 50 books celebrating the sporting life and wild landscapes of the Carolina coast. A descendant of Edward Rutledge, the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence, the South Carolina writer, also known as “Old Flintlock,” came agonizingly close to literary immortality twice. According to claims passed down through his own book jacket copy, Rutledge finished second to Robert Frost in the Pulitzer Prize contest and lost the Nobel Prize to William Faulkner by a single vote.
Rutledge was born in McClellanville in 1883, taught English for decades at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, then returned at 53 to restore his ancestral Hampton Plantation. The 18th-century mansion sits on the edge of the Francis Marion National Forest, ringed by ancient rice fields and river-delta terrain. Here, he drew his deepest inspiration and lived out his final years on the land he unceasingly chronicled, a homecoming he captured in his memoir “Home by the River.” On the grounds stands the legendary Washington Oak, spared by George Washington himself during his 1791 Southern tour. Rutledge deeded the property to the state in 1970, on the condition that it remain open to the public. “Nowhere else in the world,” he wrote of this land, “has nature been kinder to her children.”
The Village Museum, founded in 1999 by accidental historian Selden “Bud” Hill, holds one of the most impressive collections of Rutledge archives and out-of-print titles you’ll find anywhere. Most of Rutledge’s books have long since gone out of print, and the rare editions fetch devoted followers and lofty price tags. You can find large collections for purchase within the state at Ed’s Editions in Columbia and McIntosh Book Shoppe in Beaufort. Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, just offshore, is a raw, unmediated coastal wilderness that Rutledge wrote about, a landscape that still looks very much as he left it.
Beaufort, South Carolina
Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy arrived in Beaufort as a teenager when his Marine colonel father was posted there. Conroy attended high school, taught, and returned repeatedly throughout his life, writing the Lowcountry into the marrow of every narrative he penned. For Conroy, Beaufort is the first place he could truly call home. The Pat Conroy Literary Center, established in downtown Beaufort shortly after his death in 2016, houses manuscripts, photographs, and his writing desk. A year-round calendar of readings, workshops, and author panels, as well as the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival, carries his legacy forward.
Downtown Beaufort’s antebellum waterfront, draped in Spanish moss and open to the wide Beaufort River, appears throughout his novels. The Penn Center on St. Helena Island, a significant African American historical and cultural institution, was a formative place in Conroy’s life and writing, and he chose to be buried nearby in St. Helena Memorial Gardens. Hunting Island State Park delivers the wild Lowcountry landscape he conjured on the page—salt marsh and maritime forest giving way to one of the few remaining undeveloped barrier islands in South Carolina.
Key West, Florida
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway came to Key West in 1928 entirely by accident. A delayed car delivery turned a brief stopover into a decade-long love affair with the island. He moved into the Spanish colonial house at 907 Whitehead St. in 1931 and stayed until 1939, and those years were the most productive of his career. During his Key West years, he completed “A Farewell to Arms” (on his first visit in 1928), started “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and wrote “Death in the Afternoon,” “Green Hills of Africa,” and “To Have and Have Not,” set in Key West and Cuba.
The Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum is open daily. The writing studio remains intact, and the swimming pool that his second wife, Pauline, had built as a surprise is still gleaming in the garden. When Hemingway returned from covering the Spanish Civil War to find Pauline had spent $20,000—more than double what they’d paid for the house—building Key West’s first in-ground swimming pool, he threw a penny on the wet concrete and told her she’d spent all but his last cent, according to the Hemingway Home and Museum. Pauline had it pressed into the pool deck, where you can still find it today. Nearly 60 six-toed cats, direct descendants of Hemingway’s own, still rule the grounds.
Hemingway spent long afternoons sipping scotch alongside his fishing comrades at the original Sloppy Joe’s on Greene Street, now Captain Tony’s Saloon, before the bar relocated one block to its current Duval Street corner in 1937. The Key West Lighthouse, directly across from his home, served as a daily landmark in Hemingway’s view, and Old Town literary walking tours stitch together his haunts and habits.
The South doesn’t need to embellish its history. It only needs someone willing to write it down and someone else willing to make the drive. Pack a bag. Bring a book. Better yet, bring several.
