Mississippi authors have long stood their ground in the South’s competitive literary landscape.

William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize in 1949 for his textured examination of aristocratic decay in small-town Mississippi. Eudora Welty was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom for her novels and essays. More recently, the National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward explored the dark moodiness of race and poverty along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

Now they and a host of other literary heroes from the Magnolia State will be celebrated along the newly named Mississippi Writers Trail. This month, the Mississippi Arts Commission received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to set up a series of markers across the state to honor the contributions of its most prominent writers.

The first place to be acknowledged will be the home of Ms. Welty, located in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson. She lived there from 1925 until she died in 2001, and it is where she wrote nearly all of her short stories, essays and novels, including “The Optimist’s Daughter,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1973. The residence is now a museum for the author’s correspondence and photographs.