Columbus, Mississippi in The Mansion (Location)

In a passage about the possibility of an airfield being built in Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner locates his county in between "the flatter prairie land to the east near Columbus" and "the perfectly flat Delta land to the west near Greenville" (358). Columbus lies about one hundred miles southeast of 'Jefferson," i.e. Oxford. If you imagined Yoknapatawpha somewhere on a straight line drawn between Columbus and Greenville, it would be about a hundred miles south of Oxford, which is where Jefferson is usually presumed to be; perhaps in using these reference points, Faulkner is deliberately making it harder to locate his imaginary county on a real map of the state. We also use Columbus as the site of the "ground school" where Charles Mallison goes for "pre-flight" training, as we did in "Knight's Gambit" as well (283).