Mississippi is one of the great literary states, and Jackson has produced or sheltered several of its writers.
- The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty — Welty's late, Pulitzer-winning novel of a Mississippi judge's daughter returning home for her father's funeral. Quiet, sharp, and the best introduction to the writer whose house you can now visit.
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett — set in Jackson in the early 1960s, controversial for its handling of race but useful for a reader who wants the texture of segregation-era life in this city specifically.
- The Sovereignty Commission Files — not a single book but the catalogue of the state's secret spying agency, which surveilled civil rights workers, journalists, and ordinary citizens from 1956 to 1973. Several Mississippi journalists, including Jerry Mitchell in Race Against Time, have written on what those files reveal.
- Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward — not set in Jackson but in coastal Mississippi, on the run-up to Hurricane Katrina. Ward is the most important contemporary Mississippi writer.
- One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty — Welty's brief, lovely memoir of growing up in the Pinehurst Place house in the 1910s and 20s. Read it before you visit the museum.