"The Burning" - A Short Story by Eudora Welty. (Published in The Bride of Innisfallen and other Stories, 1955)

 A Post in Observation of the 105th Birth Anniversary of Eudora  Welty

Eudora Welty was born April 13, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi.  She died there in 2001.  In 1972 she won The Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist's Daughter.  Her short stories are her most cherished work.  She is often called a "Sourhern Gothic Writer", along with Flannery O'Connor, her good friend and fellow Mississipi native William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Katherine Anne Porter. This post is in honor of her 105th Birth Anniversary, it is still April 13 in Jackson, Mississippi, though it is the 14th here in the Philippines.  

A couple of years ago I did a read through of her complete short stories, something I highly recommend to any lovers of the form.   Recently I read a review copy of a very interesting book Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live by Peter Orner in which the author talks a lot about short stories he loves and writers he adores.  He totally loves the stories of Welty, he has been to her house museum on a literary pillgrimage.  Orner tells us that some of Welty's stories are kind of quaint, like "Why I Live at the P. O".  In order to understand southern Gothic writers one must face the regions history of slavery and the legacy of this travesty.  "Burning", as Omer correctly states, deals directly with slavery in Mississippi circa 1864.  The collection in which this story is published is dedicated to Welty's good friend, Elizabeth Bowen.  She spent quite some time in Bowen's castle in Ireland.  From interviewing a 100 or so Irish writers, I know Welty is highly admired by Irish readers and authors.

It is 1864.  We are in a plantation mansion outside of Jackson, Mississippi.  A technically freed slave woman, Delilah, rushes to tell her mistresses, Miss Myra and Miss Theo that a Union Soldier has entered the mansion on his horse, accompanied by another soldier. Outside the house an unruly group of ex-slaves are milling about.  On the orders of the Northern General Sherman, the Union soldiers are their to burn down the house of the sisters.  But first the ex slaves and union soldiers loot it.

The two men grab the white women, their father and brother were both lost in the war.  It was very chilling when one of the white women offered up their faithful servant as a substitute.  In these lines we see the depth of contempt in which slaves were held and the hatred for Yankess in the souls of the southern ladies.

""Is it shame that's stopping your inspection?" Miss Theo asked. "I'm afraid you found the ladies of this house a trifle out of your element. My sister's the more delicate one, as you see. May I offer you this young kitchen Negro, as I've always understood—"

Miss Theo is offering up a young woman who knows no other life but serving as a family slave as a rape substitute for her sister.  Of course the offer is a thinly veiled gross insult to the soldiers.

The house is burned.  The sisters, accompanied by the faithful exslave Delilah, go into the nearly burned to the ground Jackson, Mississippi.  They walk about pointing out what used to stand in the ashes.  Their  world is destroyed.  As the story closes the sisters hang themselves, as their last act they stand on the back of their servant, using her as a stool to stand on from which they can kill themselves by having her move once they have ropes around their necks.  

There is a plot line about a very young boy of mixed racial ancestory who dies in the fire.  One sister claims the boy was her child, her sister hushes her and says no it was our brother's son, perhaps with Delilah. 

I have now read the story three times, once two years ago and twice this week.  I think it requires rereading as it is structured almost entirely through dialogue, sometimes in regional dialect.

"Burning" is truly a great short story.

Mel u

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1982, 682 pages)

I try to organize my reading around projects.  One of my 2013 projects was to read The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.  Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, USA in 1909 and died their in 2001.  She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter.   Welty never married or had any children.    She did travel extensively in the USA and Europe.   When asked in an interview who the writers who had most influenced her were she mentioned in order Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.    Welty was a very accomplished photographer and taught college classes in creative writing.     She was a friend of William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter.  She was a close friend of Elizabeth Bowen and stayed at her castle in Ireland.  

I am very glad I read this collection.  I read the Kindle edition which I found perfectly done.  These stories, with a few exceptions, are set in the world in which Welty grew up and spent much of her life, rural Mississippi.  The stories take place in a time when race was of paramount concern, many of the stories do reflect the speech of the times and use racially abusive expressions.  This simply true to life.  Some might see her as a kind of southern Gothic writer focusing on out of place people and that is not wrong.  If you were enrolled in a class in short stories of the American South, she would be assigned along with fellow Mississippi residents, William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter.   Of course I liked some of the stories more than others.  Among my favorite are "The Petrified Man", "Lilly Daw and the Three Sisters", "The Hitch  Hikers" and a wonderful set on a train in England taking people to a boat that will take them to Ireland story, "The Bride of Innisfallen".   Some may find the use of southern dialect tiresome but from Welty it is the real stuff.  The stories are very set in time and place, a time that is over and a place unfamiliar to most people.   These are set in small town stories.  I think Elizabeth Bowen said Welty's stories reminded her a lot of life in Ireland.  

Welty's standing is below that of another writer from the American South, Flannery O'Connor.  In the seventy or so Q and A Sessions I have done with Irish writers I asked every one to name some of their favorite short story writers, many mentioned O'Connor but no one mentioned Welty.  Maybe her stories are to set in a place, maybe teachers will not assign her work because of the racial terms the characters use.  

I am very glad I read this collection.  It took me several months of on and off reading to finish it but it was a very rewarding read for me.  

Mel u

"The Bride of Innisfallen" by Eudora Welty (1955)

March 1 to April 21

A Very Irish Story 

by Eudora Welty

1909 to 2001

Jackson, Mississippi, USA

"If you're wanting to see the wonders of Ireland, the lakes and the hills.  Blue as blue skys, the lakes.  That's where you want to go, Killarney."

"The Bride of Innisfallen" by Eudora Welty deserves a place of honor during Irish Short Story Month III.   It was the lead story in a collection of short stories of the same name that Welty dedicated to her very good friend Elizabeth Bowen.  Welty spent  a summer at Bowen Castle and might even have written this story there.  "The Bride of Innisfallen" is set on a train in England.  The train takes people from London and stops on the way to Fishguard where they can catch a boat to Cork, Ireland.  

The action of the story takes place in a compartment in the train.  Some of the people are Irish who cannot wait to get home, one is an American lady on a tour.  We also meet a man from Connemara.  The great fun of this story is listening to the people explain why they are going to Ireland.  Some have made the overnight voyage several times, others are nervous about their first trip.  The Bride of Innisfallen is the name of the boat to Ireland..  We see the prejudice against

the Irish when a Welshman on the train tells the American woman that Irish is not a real language and it is a waste of time to learn it.

One of the women on the train shares her food and everybody bonds, accept the Welshman.  The Welshman asks if the others in the compartment consider Ireland a Catholic Country.  Finally a young Irish woman has had enough and she says she has six aunts living in England and they all hate it.  

There is a lot more in this story.  The conversations are perfect and we get a real feel for the train trip.  Welty loved Ireland and it shows in this wonderful story.  

Mel u

"The Hitch-Hikers" by Eudora Welty

"The Hitch-Hikers" by Eudora Welty

The Short Story Initiative for October

Crime Stories

A Simple Clockwork 

My Prior Posts on Eudora Welty

"Toward Evening, somewhere in the middle of the Delta, he slowed down to pick up two hitch-hikers".

A Simple Clockwork, my collaborator in The Short Stories of the Philippines Project, is holding a yearlong event  devoted to the short story.   Every month she offers us a  different theme.   This month it is crime stories and in November the focus will be on short stories from India.  (You can find more data on her blog and learn how to participate.   Last month we had short story enthusiasts from all over the world join in.)

One of my several reading projects is The Collected  Short Stories of Eudora Welty.   I intend to read all of them, maybe it will take a month or maybe years, and post on some of them.   For me personally it is too time consuming to post on all of the stories.   I was originally not planning to post on "The Hitch-Hikers" until I realized it was a perfect Southern Gothic style crime story which would allow me to participate in Nancy's event.   (You can find some background information on Welty in my prior posts on her work)

One of the words of received wisdom in the American South is "never pick up hitch-hikers".  ( "Hitch-Hiker" is American slang for a person who solicits a ride from a stranger by standing on the side of the road with their thumb stuck out.).   Hitch-Hikers were considered to likely be escaped convicts and such and female hitch-hikers were looked upon as likely prostitutes.   These parental warnings did not always sink in as we learn in this great story.

Tom Harris, a thirty year old travelling salesman (travelling salesmen are big in the short stories of the American South) picks up two men by the side of the road, one with a guitar case.  The car is crowded in the back with his supplies so they all have to sit in the front seat.  The one with the guitar starts to sing.  They begin to talk.   Mississippi in the late 1930s was in the midst of a horrible economic time so tramps were common.    They stop to get some food, the tramps are his company, and he buys them some lunch and beer when they stop at a roadside place, also a brothel.  The guitar player begins to sing.  There is a huge amount in this story.   I think I can tell the conclusion without spoiling the story but if you do not want to know the end stop here.

The tramp that does not have the guitar murders the one that does by bashing his head in with the guitar case.  He reveals they had intended to steal the car also.   The killing was motivated by feeling that one tramp thought because he had a guitar he was better than the  other.    The biggest quandary at the end of the story is who will get the guitar now that the owner is dead and the other man is headed for prison or a death sentence.

Please share with us your favorite Welty story and consider joining in for The Short Story Initiative  for October, focusing on Crime stories.

Mel u
The Reading Life

"Lily Daw and the Three Sisters" by Eudora Welty Her First Short Story

"Lily Daw and the Three Sisters" by Eudora Welty (1941)

The Short Stories of Eudora Welty

A Reading Life Review Project

My Prior posts on Eudora Welty

Today I am starting another Reading Life Review project.   I intend to read post at least briefly on all of the collected short stories of Eudora Welty. Maybe I will finish this project in a couple of months or it might take years but I am very happy to be adding it to my projects.   My post on her story, "The Well Worn Path" is among the top ten most viewed, out of 1202, posts on my blog so I know world wide interest in her work is very high. ( I am going to repost on stories I have previously read by Welty as I come to them in my sequential reading of her work.)

Eudora Welty (1909 to 2001, Mississippi, USA) is one of several  great writers from the American southern state of Mississippi.   (There is some background information on her in my prior posts on some of her short stories.)

Today I am posting on the lead story in Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies".   The opening line of this story is perfect its is compression of so much of history and society in one sentence.

"Mrs. Watts and Mrs. Carson were both in the post office in Victory when the letter came from the Ellisville Institute for the Feeble Minded of Mississippi."

The news in the letter is great, they learn that their niece Lily, a full grown mentally retarded woman, has been accepted at the  Ellisville Institute for the Feeble Minded of Mississippi.   They tell each other how happy Lily will be when she hears the great news.   Lily came into their care through a family tragedy and they are frankly worried about what kind of trouble Lily, who is is physically a grown and attractive woman, will get herself into and they want her off their hands.    When they tell Lily the big news she has big news of her own, she is getting married.   Of course this causes great consternation and they demand to know who the identity of the man.   They are also concerned if he has done something with Lily.   The conversations about this are just perfect. Lily does not want to go to the home for the feeble minded but somehow her aunts get her on the train going to Ellisville.   There feelings for her come out totally when we learn that they will not actually acompany her all the way there and will just hope the institute sends someone to pick her up.   Then just as the train is ready to leave, Lily sees a man on the train platform and yells out, there he is!.

The rest of the story is just so amazing and speaks so deeply of the cruelty and sexual fears of the older women in the story that I will leave it untold.

Welty is a master of dialect.   I loved this story and am totally looking forward to reading all of her short stories.


Do you have a favorite Welty story?   Please share your experience with Welty with us.


My thanks to Max u for giving me a gift card which allowed me to purchase the ebook in which I read this story.

Mel u

A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty by Carolyn J. Brown

A Daring Life:  A Biography of Eudora Welty by Carolyn J. Brown (to be published August 2012)

A Daring Life:  A Biography of Eudora Welty by Carolyn J. Brown (University Press of Mississippi) is a very fine biography of one of the best short story writers in the world who also won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel, The Optimist's Daughter.  Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson Mississippi (in the southern portion of the United States) and she died there in 2001.   She was very rooted in Mississippi and many of her stories deal with racial strife of the era and the mental state behind it.   Brown does a very good job of explaining how much courage it took for Welty to expose the prejudices of the time in her stories but beyond this she acted on her belief in racial equality in her lectures and personal life.

Welty had what will at first seem to many a boring life to chronicle compared to writers like Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield,  and Babara Baynton.   She had no tumultuous romances, no bouts with madness, she did not die a tragic early death,  she did not suffer any great poverty or experience great riches.   The life of Welty was in her closeness to her family and friends and in her brilliant and free roaming mind.   She was very much a lover of the reading life.   Welty was a great daughter, sister and friend to many  writers but that was not all.  In  one very telling detail, Brown relays to us how when Welty met a mentally challenged man who, though he never had gotten any mail his whole life, went to the post office everyday to check his mail, began sent him regular post cards for the rest of her life.   Welty was a very kind and good person who does not seem possessed of a darker side.   This for sure could not be said of Woolf or Mansfield.  There are no scandals in the closet, maybe this is bit of a sad thing as well as a good one.

Brown does a very good job of explaining how Welty got interested in becoming a writer and her initial struggles to get published.  It was The New Yorker that helped to put Welty on the literary map and Brown explains this very well.   Brown talks about Welty's perhaps romantic interests but it appears nothing ever happened.   There are unanswered questions here.   It was great to read about Welty's friendship with Elizabeth Bowen and her visit to Bowen Castle in Ireland.  I was wonderful to read about Bowen's visit to Mississippi at one of the emotional low points in Welty's life.   One would love to have a recording of their conversations.

Welty lectured at many of the best known schools of the USA such as Harvard and additionally at Oxford.

Brown tells us about Welty's time as a photographer during the depression era in the USA.   There are lots of very interesting photographs included in the book.   There are lists of all of her published works, an appendix on her art work and her house and famous garden, which is now a museum.

A Daring Life:  A Biography of Eudora Welty by Carolyn J. Brown is a very detailed biography of Welty that also places her in the social context in which she developed and lived.   Welty traveled over much of Europe, read thousands of books, was friends with great writers like fellow Mississippians  Katherine Ann Porter and William Faulkner but you cannot understand her stories without understand what Jackson, Mississippi  was like and Brown gives us this understanding.  

I recommend this book to anyone interested in Welty and think it should be part of the budget of all libraries in the USA and UK.  that can place it there.    It will become an important work in understanding her work.  

Where does Welty rank among the great female short story writers?  I would say just a bit below Katherine Mansfield and Flannery O'Connor.

Here is a link to my prior posts on some of Eudora Welty's short stories

In the interests of full disclosure I received a pre-publication E-Book of this from the University Press of Mississippi via Net Galley.

Mel u

Three Great Short Stories by Ladies from the American South

"He"  by Katherine Anne Porter (1927, 8 pages)
"A Visit of Charity" by Eudora Welty (1941, 5 pages)
"The Geranium" by Flannery O'Connor (1946, 5 pages)

Three Wonderful Short Stories by

Ladies of the American South

I know it  is considered in some very trendy quarters to be no longer correct to refer to a collection of women as "ladies"  but in the case of Katherine Anne Porter (Texas), Eudora Welty (Mississippi) and Flannery O'Connor (Georgia)  I cannot bring myself to refer to them in any other way.      Each  produced world class treasures in the novel and the short story.    I have posted on all three of these writers already so I just want to let people know about these three stories I have recently read.    The stories are a bit "regionalized" in the same way Irish short stories often are but don't let that stop you from reading these stories!

"He" by Katherine Anne Porter.    Porter (1890 to 1980-Indian Creek Texas) is probably best known for her 1962 novel Ship of Fools.   She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her collected short stories.   The received opinion is that, the same is true of all the writers of today,  her short stories are her best work.    (There is additional background information on her in my prior post on her.)   "He" is a heart breaking story about a mother's love for her mentally challenged son.   The family in the story is struggling to survive in the face of some of the worse times in American history.    The setting is small town Rural Texas just before the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.    This story, told in the third person, is so beautifully written it is almost painful.   As the story opens we learn that the mother cannot help but love him more than her other two children.    He is also a burden on her and her husband.   I think one of the biggest concerns of parents of mentally challenged children lies in their fears about what will happen to them when the parents are gone.     Who will take care of their mentally handicapped ten year old son when he is twenty, thirty, forty or fifty.   When he is stronger than his father?   Can or should he be prevented from reproducing?    Porter does a masterful job of making us feel the parents concerns.   We also see how having such a child can change (and sometimes wreck) a marriage.    At the end of the story we have to decide if the right thing has been done for the right reasons.   This story will make you think.

You can read "He" HERE

"A Visit of Charity" by Eudora Welty (1909 to 2001-Jackson, Mississippi-Pulitzer Prize 1973) is a favorite of book bloggers world wide.    She was a good friend of Elizabeth Bowen and spent some time at her castle in Ireland (I would loved to have listened in at tea time!)    This story is set in small town Mississippi in the 1940s in  a time when all of the negative stereo types about the American South were reality.    As it opens a young girl is making a visit to a charity home for old people.    She is going so she can earn "points" in her Girl Scout type of group. What is great about this story is the interaction of the girl, the two very old women she visits (they are roommates) with each other and the women with the girl.    It is up to us to decide what the girl gets from the visit.   (There is additional information on Welty in my prior posts on her.)

You can read "A Visit of Charity" Here.    Lakeside Musings has an excellent post on this story.

Of these three writers, I guess Flannery O'Connor's star is now shining brightest.   Kenzaburo Oe treats her work as a near holy text.    O'Connor (1924 to 1964-Savannah, Georgia) was the author of the well regarded novel Wise Blood but it is her short stories that will bring her immortality.   (There is additional background information on O'Connor in my prior posts on her.)

"The Geranium" was O'Connor's master thesis at the famous Iowa Writer's Academy.   I think is one of her very first published stories.    She was only 21 when she wrote it.    I concede it does not have the full power of some of her more mature work but it is for sure worth reading and not just to see her first short story (but to lovers of the short story, that is really a good enough reason).   The story centers on an elderly man that has been rescued from a charity home by his adult daughter.    The fun of this story is in the depiction of the relationship of the father and his daughter and his interaction with his enviornment.   The story is also about race relations and it makes use of words that may rule it out as a class room story.

You can read "The  Geranium" HERE

Mel u

Eudora Welty-Two Short Stories -"A Curtain of Green" and "The Hitch-Hikers"

"A Curtain of Green"  (1941, pages)  and "The Hitch-Hikers" (1941, 6 pages) both by Eudora Welty


I have already posted on four short stories by Eudora Welty (Mississippi, USA 1909 to 2001).   In my post on her wonderful story "Why I Live at the P. O."  I have given some background information on Welty.

I recently learned from Amateur Reader that Welty maintained a long term correspondence with Henry Green.  She was also good friends with Elizabeth Bowen.   I do not yet have it verified but I think she must have met them when she was travelling on a fellow ship in England.   She also lectured at Oxford and Cambridge.   Bowen lived in Oxford for a while and if Welty met her then she could have met Green through Bowen.   If anyone has more details on this please leave a comment.

All of the six stories I have read by Welty are very different from each other while having similarities.    Each is  set in a small town in the American south.    Each does deal with people on the edge, those who do not quite fit into society.  

"A Curtain of Green" is a fascinating story about a woman trying to cope with her grief over the death of her husband by working in her garden.   The woman becomes more and more withdrawn while her garden becomes wilder and wilder.    It is really brilliant and took me into the mind of the woman.   I also see the reaction of others in her community to her.  

You can read it online.

They tell you it is never a a good idea to pick up hitch-hikers and "The Hitch-Hikers"  sure showed me why!   A business man sees two hitch-hikers  by the side of the road and he decides to pick them up.    The business man is a confusing character.   He ends up at a very strange party.    This is a puzzling kind of story but I think it will stick with me.  

You can read it online

I like all the six stories I have read or heard by Welty.   Each person in her stories seem real.    I for sure will be rereading more Welty-if anyone has any suggestions, please leave a comment.

If anyone has any short story suggestions please leave a comment


Mel u

Two Short Stories by Eudora Welty-"Worn Path" and "Lily and the Three Ladies"

"Worn Path" (1941, 8 pages) by "Lilly and the Three Ladies" (1940, 6 pages) both by Eudora Welty

"Tell my old friend Elizabeth Bowen
I will be back for her day during
Irish Story Week"-Eudora Welty-

So far I have read  and posted on two of Eudora Welty (1909 to 2001-Mississippi, USA), "Why I Live at the P. O." and "The Petrified Man".    (I included a bit of background information on Welty in those posts, so in this post I will just talk briefly about two more of her stories that I was very happy to find online.)

Welty's stories all seem to be set in small Mississippi towns in the 1930s and 1940s.    Several of them are set in Victory, Mississippi, a town she made up.    Each of the four stories I have read so far are really quite unique.

I will generalize a little at the end of the post.

"Worn Path" is about a very old Black woman on her way to a clinic to get medicine for her grandson.   It is told in a very simple style, almost as if it were a folk story rather than the carefully crafted work of art it is.   As the woman makes her long journey she encounters  obstacles (at times it almost felt like something out of The Wizard of Oz) from a barking dogs to a young Caucasian hunter.   (As background information, we do need to know that setting is one in which racism is very much still a daily factor in life and is accepted as the norm.)      The hunter tries to help her, offering her a nickel but he treats the woman-old enough to be his great-grandmother with no respect as if she were a simple minded child.    The woman also clearly has a diminished mental capacity brought on by her old age.    The story seems so simple on the surface but it admits of many readings but just for the mere facts of  the story as well as the multiple symbolic themes we can find-

You can read  "Worn Path" online here

"Lily and the Three Ladies" is about Lilly,a learning challenged girl now grown to sexual maturity.   Her mother died a long time ago and three ladies have been taking care of her.   Now that she is becoming physically an adult they want to put her in a home    This passage set the tone of the story and also gives a good sense of Welty's prose style in the story:

Mrs Watts and Mrs Carson were both in the post office in Victory when the letter came from the Ellisville Institute for the Feeble Minded of Mississippi. Aimee Slocum, with her hand still full of mail, ran out in front and handed it straight to Mrs Watts, and they all three read it together. Mrs Watts held it taut between her pink hands, and Mrs Carson underscored each line slowly with her thimbled finger. Everybody else in the post office wondered what was up now.
    "What will Lily say," beamed Mrs Carson at last, "when we tell her we're sending her to Ellisville!"

Lily has her own idea.   Lily tells them she is going to get married!-  They ask her to who and it turns out it is to a musician in a traveling show that passed through the town last night.   Everybody assumes the worse.   It was very interesting to see how the ladies talk about the possible molestation of Lily in the very reticent era and place of the story.    They assume at first the musician just told her he wanted to marry her to get her to sleep with him.   There is a really neat twist here and will not spoil it.   It is very interesting to see how Welty shows us the very different attitudes toward Lily of each of the three women.  

"Lily and the Three Ladies" can be read online here.  (This goes to a web page of the New York Times and I had to register-free-to view the story.)

If you like you can go to Youtube and search and you will find a very wonderful interview with Welty where she talks about "A Worn Path" and also dramatizations of these stories.

    

Welty's stories seem to be about marginal people in small town Mississippi but they are really universal in their  application, I think.   They seem very simple but they have a myth feel and I think they could sink down into your mind if you read them a few times.   So far I not have a favorite among her stories.  

Please leave a comment if you might be interested in participating in Irish Short Story Week-March 13 to the 20-

Mel u

"The Petrified Man" by Eudora Welty

"Elizabeth, I will for sure stop back on  March 16
for Elizabeth Bowen Day during Irish Short Story
week"-Eudora Welty

"The Petrified Man" by Eudora Welty (1941, 8 pages)

The Reading Life Staff Offers a special welcome to all University of Mississippi Students-please feel free to leave any questions or comments you might have-you can truly be proud of Eudora Welty-a world class author!

"The Petrified Man" is the second short story by  Eudora Welty that I have posted on this year.   Prior to this I read and enjoyed very much her famous story about family life in small town Mississippi in the early 1940s, "Why I Live at the P.O."     Welty (1909 to 2001) traveled extensively but she lived all of her life in Jackson,  Mississippi.  Welty was mentored in her literary career by a fellow Mississippian, Katherine Anne Porter.   She even visited Elizabeth Bowen at her manor house in Ireland.  Welty had won a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed her to travel to Ireland and The UK.   While in England she guest lectured at Oxford and that is where  she met Bowen   Welty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel The Optimist's Daughter.     


I have said before that overall I am not a big fan of literary works that make use of "rural dialects" in conversations of characters.   I do not like it slows down my reading speed, it often seems patronizing to the characters and culture the story is about, and is it very hard to do well.   Welty does the conversations beautifully without the slightest hint of condescension.    "The Petrified Man" is set in a beauty parlor in small town Mississippi in the early 1940s.   The people in the story either work in the parlor or are getting a hair treatment.    All of the characters are women, either workers or customers.

"The Petrified" man is told almost entirely in conversation.    Welty shows huge talent in keeping the story flowing forward.    I really felt like I was a fly on the wall in that beauty parlor.  (And I am betting there were real flies buzzing around!)    The women talk about intimate details of their lives in passing conversations.   I got the feeling the beauty parlor was kind of the "nerve center" for the women of the town.    Of course one of the big topics of conversation is the men in their lives.    Another big topic of conversation is a traveling carnival passing through the area.   Most such carnivals has what at the time were called "Freak Shows".   One of  the people in this show is a man who is supposedly partially made of stone.   He calls himself  "The Petrified Man".

This story can be read online here.

"The Petrified Man" is really a lot of fun.   It is what I would call a friendly story. It is not hard to read, just go a little slow.     Welty's work is not yet in the public domain.   I have found two more of her short stories online on the web pages of the magazines where they were originally published.    I will post on them  together soon.   I will also, in my next post on Welty, also take a look at Harold Bloom's view of Welty, which I found very interesting and illuminating.



If you have any suggestions for short stories I might like, especially ones that can be read online, please leave a comment.

Mel u

"Why I Live at the P. O." by Eudora Welty

10                                 30                   80

"Why I Live at the P. O." by Eudora Welty (1941, 10 pages)


I have seen Eudora Welty's name on several "best American short story" lists.   Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi (in the southern portion of the USA) in 1909 and she died there in 2001.     She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel, The Optimist's Daughter.     She also wrote a number of short stories (41, I think).

.   As her work is not and will not be in the public domain for many years to come I was happy to see one of her most famous short stories, "Why I  Live at the P. O." can be read online.   ("P. O".  for those not familiar with American short hand slang, stands for Post Office.)  Wikipedia has a good basic article on her life and career.     Welty never married or had any children.    She did travel extensively in the USA and Europe.   When asked in an interview who the writers who had most influenced her were she mentioned in order Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.    Welty was a very accomplished photographer and taught college classes in creative writing.     She was a friend of William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter.

Why I Live at the P. O." is told in the first person by a woman who has some serious issues with her family.   I will quote from the opening lines of the story so readers can see Welty's prose style:

I WAS GETTING ALONG FINE with Mama, Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again. Mr. Whitaker! Of course I went with Mr. Whitaker first, when he first appeared here in China Grove, taking "Pose Yourself" photos, and Stella-Rondo broke us up. Told him I was one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I'm the same. Stella-Rondo is exactly twelve months to the day younger than I am and for that reason she's spoiled.

One can see a life time of family history in these lines or perhaps it is better to say one can construct a life time from them.    The world of the story is a very insular one.   Of course there is no TV, no Internet (horrors), no cell phones and every body who lives in the town the story is set in was born there.     (Sometimes I think stories from the American south that make use of regional dialogue seem patronizing to those not from the region. )     Sometimes stories about people from the American south seem to over emphasis the insularity of the region, its poverty and problematic racial attitudes.    This predisposes international readers of such stories to dismiss the people in the stories of  writers from the American South as "hicks".   I am not saying this is right or fair but it is an accurate statement of perceptions.  

Welty lets the characters tell the story.   We get a really good look at the family dynamics of the Rondo clan.
This story is fun.    You can decide for your self if the narrator was justified in living at the Post Office (where she worked) or not.    It is a good story and a very enjoyable read.  

"Why I Live at the P. O." can be read online

I think this is a story that could be taught to students 12 and above.

Mel u