First Stop: Oxford Square

But above all, the courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the county’s circumference like a single cloud in its ring of horizon…

When you drive into Oxford, the courthouse is the first literary landmark you see, the centerpiece of Oxford Square, where a bronze plaque bears that passage from Requiem for a Nun. The statue in front, a Confederate soldier, has made cameos in various stories: Soldiers Pay, Requiem for a Nun, and most famously The Sound and the Fury:

They approached the square, where the Confederate soldier gazed with empty eyes beneath his marble hand in wind and weather.