Hubert Creekmore

Creekmore left Water Valley and became useful to American letters: an editor at New Directions, a critic for the New York Times and an early mentor to Eudora Welty, whose brother married his sister. His novels turned on the South and drew fire there. A Jackson newspaper said his first, about poor whites, belonged in the garbage can. The Chain in the Heart attacked the treatment of Black Mississippians, and The Welcome, his only explicitly gay work, derided the region's forced heterosexuality. Hostile reviews and the pressure of being openly gay may have pushed him to New York.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Casey Jones Railroad Museum — steps away
  The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.
• Enid Lake — 16 mi
  A Corps of Engineers lake on the Yocona River, finished in 1952 after farm families were moved off the valley floor, and the home water of a world-record white crappie.
• Rowan Oak — 16 mi
  William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 16 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.

More markers nearby

• Casey Jones — steps away
• James Ford — steps away
• Theora Hamblett — 9.4 mi
• Battle of Coffeeville — 12 mi