{"id":22470,"date":"2015-02-26T09:40:12","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T14:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=22470"},"modified":"2015-02-26T12:02:05","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T17:02:05","slug":"why-i-live-at-the-p-o-eudora-welty-classic-accepted-for-publication-74-years-ago-this-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/why-i-live-at-the-p-o-eudora-welty-classic-accepted-for-publication-74-years-ago-this-month\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhy I Live at the P.O.\u201d: Eudora Welty Classic Accepted For Publication 74 Years Ago This Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today we honor Eudora Alice Welty<\/strong> (1909\u20132001), the sheltered girl from Jackson who grew into one of the nation\u2019s finest on-the-page storytellers of all-time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The occasion is the anniversary of the acceptance for publication of her famous work, \u201cWhy I Live at the P.O.,\u201d which was acquired by the Atlantic Monthly<\/em> on February 12, 1941, the same year the magazine published \u201cA Worn Path.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Both of those stories can be found in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty<\/em>, which won \"EudoraWeltyRocks\"<\/a> the National Book Award in 1983. The Pulitzer Prize for Literature was awarded to Welty in 1973 for the novel, The Optimist\u2019s Daughter<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

A favorite of fellow writers as varied as Ray Bradbury<\/strong> and her friend and fellow Mississippian Richard Ford<\/strong>, Welty said of her childhood, \u201cI am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026all serious daring starts from within.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It is deep within, specifically the complicated blueprints of family dynamics, from which Welty\u2019s best work proceeds.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the much anthologized \u201cWhy I Live at the P.O.\u201d has always been at the forefront of her best work. In 1998, the Memphis-born actress and filmmaker Jodie Markell<\/strong> made a half-hour film of the story starring Catherine Kellner<\/strong> and Robert Morse<\/strong> and Ms. Markell.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a fabulous tale\u2014imagine Garcia Marquez ensconced in a small Mississippi town, nothing but kimonos and firecrackers\u2014and takes place on the Fourth of July. You might say it\u2019s a story of Independence (\u201csay goodbye, it\u2019s Independence
\nDay \u2026\u201d)<\/em> as a much put-upon woman named Sister leaves her family to move into the tiny post-office where she works.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are often reminded that it is \u201cthe next to smallest p.o. in the entire state of Mississippi,\u201d but in Sister\u2019s mind, it offers more breathing room than her own home.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Early in the Great Depression in New York City, where she studied advertising at Columbia University after taking a degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, Welty took photographs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her wanderings took her to jazz in Harlem and the pictures she took were often of working people who could not find work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of this time, she wrote: \u201cMaking pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

An image she captured while employed by FDR\u2019s Works Progress Administration inspired the \u201cP.O.\u201d story, one of a woman ironing at the back of a small post office.<\/span><\/p>\n

Welty took pictures through the 1950s. The work can be seen in two collections of her photographs: One Time, One Place<\/em> (1971), and Photographs<\/em> (1989).<\/span><\/p>\n

To see the floors Welty trod and the walls that sheltered her as her genius developed, visit the Tudor-styled home she lived from college graduation to her death from pneumonia at 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson, now a museum.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the author\u2019s own take on her work, see Conversations with Eudora Welty, <\/em>edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw<\/strong>, University Press of Mississippi.<\/span><\/p>\n

And to call upon Miss Welty, visit the Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, North West Street at George Street. There you can read a quote from The Optimist\u2019s Daughter<\/em> upon her headstone.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFor her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love \u2026\u201d\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today we honor Eudora Alice Welty (1909\u20132001), the sheltered girl from Jackson who grew into one of the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":249,"featured_media":22471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[314],"tags":[5573,5562,5567,5460,1504,5572,5566,5571,5565,4902,5568,5563,5564,5570,5569,5561],"class_list":["post-22470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-history","tag-a-worn-path","tag-atlantic-monthly","tag-catherine-kellner","tag-eudora-welty","tag-greenwood","tag-jackson-mississippi","tag-jodie-markell","tag-peggy-whitman-prenshaw","tag-ray-bradbury","tag-richard-ford","tag-robert-morse","tag-the-collected-stories-of-eudora-welty","tag-the-optimists-daughter","tag-university-press-of-mississippi","tag-whitman-prenshaw","tag-why-i-live-at-the-p-o"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/rafaelEudoraFEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/249"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}