Oxford unveils bronze statue honoring author and former firefighter Larry Brown

Oxford marked a new civic landmark Thursday with the unveiling of a bronze statue honoring Larry Brown at Morgan Family Park, turning the former site of Fire Station No. 1 into a public tribute to one of the city’s most recognizable sons. The placement is as important as the sculpture itself: Brown spent 17 years with the Oxford Fire Department before becoming a full-time writer, and the statue places his working life and literary legacy in the same frame.

Mayor Robyn Tannehill said the tribute reflects both Brown’s courage as a firefighter and the courage it took to leave that path and write full time. She also cast the statue as part of a larger question Oxford has long answered in stone, bronze and public funding, saying the city has many things that put it on the map, but the arts and literary scene are among the most legitimate. In Morgan Family Park, that idea now has a permanent, visible form.

The city set aside $75,000 for the figurative bronze sculpture and moved forward with the project in 2025, approving the request for qualifications in late April and reviewing artist submissions on May 2. Bill Beckwith, the Taylor sculptor who also created Oxford’s William Faulkner statue, was selected for the commission. The finished work was cast at Inferno Art Foundry in Atlanta and designed as a seated bronze figure modeled from archival photographs.

Brown, born in Oxford on July 9, 1951, joined the Oxford Fire Department in 1973, became captain in 1986 and quit on January 6, 1990, after 17 years on the job to write full time. His books, including Facing the Music, Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son, Fay, The Rabbit Factory, Big Bad Love, Billy Ray’s Farm: Essays from a Place Called Tula and A Miracle of Catfish, made him one of Mississippi’s best-known contemporary writers. Joe was later adapted into a film starring Nicolas Cage, and Brown won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the Thomas Wolfe Prize and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award.

Brown’s son, Shane Brown, said the monument ensures his father’s legacy will endure for future generations. Visitors to Morgan Family Park will now see a seated bronze Larry Brown holding a book, with textured surfaces meant to reflect the grit of the life he lived and wrote about. The statue also anchors Brown more tightly to the Lafayette County landscape that shaped his fiction, from his childhood near Potlockney to the rural North Mississippi world that runs through his work.