Memphis has produced or inspired a rich body of literature — the music, the history of the civil rights movement, the Delta blues tradition, and the city's complicated racial history have all drawn serious writers. Reading before you go makes the place considerably more resonant.
Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues — Paul Oliver's 1960 study — the first serious academic work on the blues — uses the lyrics of hundreds of recorded songs to reconstruct the social world of the African American South in the first half of the twentieth century. Flood, imprisonment, migration, poverty, work, and desire all appear in close reading of the music. Oliver, a British writer, approached the subject with an outsider's rigor; the book has never been superseded as a foundational text, and it remains unusually readable for a work of musicology.
Visiting the Stax Museum, the W.C. Handy House, or just walking Beale Street on a music night is more meaningful with some sense of where the blues came from and what it was carrying. Oliver provides that background better than any other book.
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music — Greil Marcus's 1975 cultural study examines American music through the lens of a handful of artists — including Elvis Presley and Robert Johnson — to argue that rock and roll is the latest expression of a distinctly American mythology. The sections on Elvis and Sun Studio are particularly relevant to Memphis: Marcus describes how Sam Phillips's recording sessions fused white country music with black Delta blues to produce something genuinely new, and why Presley's recordings felt, to those who heard them in 1954, like the sound of a country breaking with its past.
The book is not a conventional music history — it reads more like criticism in the tradition of Edmund Wilson or James Agee, taking popular culture seriously as a way of understanding American life. Walking Beale Street or standing in the Sun Studio control room is a different experience if you've read it.
The Firm — Grisham's 1991 breakthrough thriller is set largely in Memphis, following a young Harvard Law graduate who takes what seems like a dream job at a small Memphis law firm — only to discover that his new employers are deeply connected to the Chicago mob. The Memphis backdrop is specific and convincing: the firm's offices in the mid-rise business district, the restaurants on the Beale Street side of downtown, the residential feel of East Memphis where the lawyers live in large houses with manicured lawns. Grisham was himself a lawyer in nearby Southaven, Mississippi, and knows this milieu from the inside.
The novel captures something real about the Memphis professional class of the late 1980s — its ambitions, its conservatism, its sense of being a large city in a small-city world. It is not literature, but it is good entertainment, and it will put you in the particular atmosphere of the place.
The Reivers — Faulkner's final novel, published in 1962, follows an eleven-year-old boy, a car thief, and a horse trader on a picaresque journey from Jefferson, Mississippi, to Memphis — the big city, both thrilling and morally chaotic, that stands just beyond the horizon of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Memphis appears in the novel as a place of temptation and consequence, specifically in the person of Miss Reba's brothel in the red-light district. It is Faulkner at his most relaxed and comic, and the portrait of early twentieth-century Memphis — the dirt roads, the automobiles, the vice districts — is drawn from life.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Faulkner died before he could collect it. For anyone visiting both Memphis and Oxford on the same trip, The Reivers provides a natural literary bridge between the two cities.