OXFORD, Miss. "Civilization begins with distillation," William Faulkner wrote, and in his adopted hometown, it's possible for a literary pilgrim to visit what's left of his liquor cabinet.

Rowan Oak, Faulkner's family home, is open to visitors, and in a glass case you will find a bottle of Four Roses bourbon, which he liked because it was inexpensive and easy to find. There's his metal mint julep cup. There's also a bottle of Harvey's Fine Tawny Hunting Port, which he used for cooking game birds while a second bottle, for drinking, warmed in the ashes of the fire. And there are a few bottles of fine French wine, which he could afford to imbibe after winning the Nobel Prize in 1949.

A trip to view Faulkner's spirits is the best possible way to begin a long weekend in Oxford, a town in which civilization and distillation, in all their higher forms, are revered. At no time is this more true than on fall weekends when the University of Mississippi football team is making a home stand. On home-game weekends, the free-floating festivity - a kind of refined, khaki-wearing Mardi Gras - lasts for days. An old saying here goes, "Ole Miss may not win the game, but we will always win the party."

Tailgate at the Grove

On a Saturday morning in early fall, as the Rebels were preparing to play the University of Georgia Bulldogs, the place to be in Oxford - as it is before and after every home game - was the Grove, the legendary 10-acre tailgating lawn at the center of the Ole Miss campus. This is a sight to see, almost certainly the most convivial landscape in college athletics. A sea of tents in red and blue, the Ole Miss colors, are packed tightly among mature oak, magnolia and elm trees. Many of these tents are tended as carefully as summer homes. You'll find good linen, elegant pitchers filled with chilled bloody marys and flat-screen TVs. "Y'all behave last night?" is a pretty standard greeting. Tailgating in the Grove has been a tradition at Ole Miss since the 1950s, its rituals closely attended to. This is not a land of face- and chest-painters. Many male students wear coats, ties and loafers; female students mostly wear brightly colored cocktail dresses and more makeup than one is accustomed to seeing on a human face in daylight. The polite din is shattered, every so often, when a hoarse voice cries out, "Are you ready?" This is the beginning of the Ole Miss cheer, known as "Hotty Toddy." Everyone within earshot yells back: "Helllll yes! Daaamn Right!" The batty, but catchy, cheer rolls on:

Hotty Toddy, Gosh almighty

Who the hell are we, Hey!

Flim Flam, Bim Bam

OLE MISS BY DAMN!

Otherwise sane adults are unembarrassed to holler this out every 10 minutes or so.

Amid the crowd, too, you might catch a glimpse of the University of Mississippi's greatest sports legend, Archie Manning. He was Ole Miss' starting quarterback for three years in the late 1960s and early '70s - and he is the head of a football dynasty: His sons Peyton and Eli are, respectively, Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks for the Indianapolis Colts and the New York Giants. Like his father, Eli was a starting quarterback at Ole Miss.

Traces of the Old Confederacy linger around the margins at Ole Miss, and the university is working hard to scrub most of them away. In 1997 the university squelched the flying of Confederate flags during games by banning sticks in the stadium under the guise of fan safety. Since then, the university has had an easier time recruiting talented black players, including Michael Oher, the Ole Miss offensive tackle made famous in Michael Lewis' 2006 book "The Blind Side."

In 2003, the school's longtime mascot, Colonel Reb, with his unfortunate resemblance to a plantation owner, was given his walking papers. The changes at a revived and increasingly modern Ole Miss mirror the changes in Oxford itself over the past two or three decades - an era in which Oxford has become one of the South's artiest and most literate college towns, a pint-sized and much more navigable Austin, Texas.

Books and food

I've visited Oxford (population 14,147) many times and have slowly arrived at the opinion that it may be America's best small city, at least for my needs, which include great bookstores, friendly dive bars and restaurants that do profound things with game birds, pulled pork, grits, delta catfish and oysters.

The first thing to know about Oxford today is how central books, and writers, are to its social and intellectual fabric. Faulkner's complicated legacy lingers in the air. While he was alive, Faulkner wasn't beloved in Oxford. The locals called him "Count No-Count" because of his dandified aloofness and lack of a steady job. You can still walk into J.E. Neilson's roomy department store, on Oxford's town square, and find a framed copy of Faulkner's irritable response to a dunning note on an overdue bill: "If this ($10 payment) dont (sic) suit you," he wrote, "the only alternative I can think of is, in the old Miltonian phrase, sue and be damned." Following his death in 1962, however, Oxford gradually began to embrace Faulkner and his legacy.

Oxford's modern renaissance began around 1979, many locals say. That was the year Richard and Lisa Howorth opened Square Books, an independent bookstore that's become a Mississippi landmark. Square Books, on Oxford's downtown square, prominently features the works of the state's living writers and also tends to its literary ghosts. Near the front door are complete or nearly so collections of the works of Mississippi writers like Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Ford, Shelby Foote, Willie Morris, Barry Hannah, Walker Percy, Larry Brown, Donna Tartt and John Grisham. Hundreds of framed photographs of writers line the walls.

Grisham graduated in 1981 from the University of Mississippi's law school, and lived for a while in Oxford. He left in 1994 after his fame began to turn him into a walking tourist attraction. Running almost parallel to Oxford's literary rebirth has been its emergence as a hotbed of Southern eats. This is largely thanks to the young New Orleans-born chef John Currence, who owns four popular restaurants in town: City Grocery, Snackbar, Boure and Big Bad Breakfast. Currence won a James Beard award in 2009 for best Southern chef, and it's possible to eat brilliantly in Oxford for weeks, without repeating a course, in his restaurants alone. Currence's flagship restaurant, City Grocery, which opened in 1992, has long been a literary hangout. "I love and respect what writers do," Currence said, "and I love it that my places can be clubhouses for them. For writers, I think, City Grocery is especially appealing. It's got a tortured naturalist dive bar upstairs with a refined downstairs. We've got quality and degeneracy."