Walter Inglis Anderson spent years rowing a small boat alone to Horn Island, twelve miles offshore in the Mississippi Sound, to paint the birds, waves, and light he found there. He slept on the sand, ate what he caught, and filled journals with watercolors of an intensity that shocked the people who found them after his death in 1965. But the real discovery came later. His family opened a locked room in the Ocean Springs cottage where he had lived and found the walls and ceiling covered floor to ceiling with murals — a private cosmos of herons, shrimp boats, pelicans, and coastal storms that he had painted for no audience at all. The room is now preserved at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs. You can stand inside it. Anderson also painted the vast community center murals in Ocean Springs — 3,000 square feet of Gulf Coast life rendered by a man who preferred the company of egrets to people. His Horn Island journals, published posthumously, are among the most remarkable nature writings produced in the American South.