On loan from William Faulkner’s home Rowan Oak are two 1950s paperbacks from the Nobel Prize winning author’s library, including a short story collection by Hugo and Nebula award winner Arthur C. Clarke. Of equal stature in the mid-twentieth century genre of science fiction was Isaac Asimov, who very kindly responded to an autographed book request from an Oxford, Mississippi fan.

James Parmer Farrell received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering from the University of Mississippi in 1943. In the early 1950s he participated in special limited edition pre-order promotion by Fantasy Press. Among the authors of this specialty science fiction press was John W. Campbell, editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction who was a powerful force in shaping the genre during the Golden Age of Science Fiction (often recognized as 1938 to 1946).

From publisher Seymour Lawrence’s collection are two works by literary great Kurt Vonnegut. His satire Sirens of Titan (1959) eventually reveals that aliens have consistently manipulated human history with their messages to a stranded fellow on Jupiter’s moon (these same aliens will reappear in his most famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five). The 1972 book Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5: A Space Fantasy features the screenplay and photographs from a television Playhouse adaptation based upon several of Vonnegut’s works.

Born in Alligator, Mississippi, Jack Butler’s poems have appeared in eminent journals and anthologies and his novel Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The typed manuscript for the title poem of his collection The Kid Who Wanted to Be a Spaceman (1984) is accompanied by a page from a petition asking the president to “send poet Jack Butler into space as America’s first non-astronaut space explorer.”