Eudora Welty

“The zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good.”

A Southerner born in Jackson, Mississippi, and educated at the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia, EUDORA WELTY is one of the most versatile and talented of our shortstory writers. The Atlantic has published some of her best work: her Negro stories, “A Worn Path" and “Livvie Is Back” (winner of the O. Henry Award in 1942); “Powerhouse,”her unforgettable picture of a jazz band; “Hello and Good-bye,” with its melting butter account of a Southern beauty contest. Beginning writers will measure their experiences with those which she recounted in the February Atlantic and continues here.

“I feel like saying as a friend, to beginning writers, Don’t be unduly worried by the analyses of stories you may see in some textbooks or critical articles.”

A short story

SUMMARY. — Laura McRaven, nine, arrives at Shellmound, plantation home of her dead mother’s brother, Battle Fairchild, in the Mississippi Delta, during the late summer of 1923. The family consists of Battle and Ellen, their eight children ranging from Shelley, eighteen, to Bluet, two; the old aunts, Mac and Shannon; and dead brother Denis’s child, Maureen, not quite right in her head from injury in infancy. Two more sisters of Battle’s, the old maids Primrose and Jim Allen, live at a near-by plantation; Tempe Summers, his oldest sister, has come from Inverness with her grandchild, Lady Clare Buchanan.

SUMMARY. — Laura McRaven, nine, arrives at Shellmound, plantation home of her dead mother’s brother, Battle Fairchild, in the Mississippi Delta, during the late summer of 1923. The family consists of Battle and Ellen, their eight children ranging from Shelley, eighteen, to Bluet, two; the old aunts, Mac and Shannon; and dead brother Denis’s child, Maureen, not quite right in her head from injury in infancy. Two more sisters of Battle’s, the old maids Primrose and Jim Allen, live at a near-by plantation; Tempe Summers, his oldest sister, has come from Inverness with her grandchild, Lady Clare Buchanan,
The family are preparing for the wedding of Dabney, seventeen, to Troy Flavin, the Shellmound overseer. George, Battle’s younger brother from Memphis, the adored one of the family, has just brought the news that his wife Robbie Reid (whom the family considers as “common” as Troy) has left him. Robbie, unknown to all but Shelley and Troy, who has advised her to go back to her husband, reaches the town of Fairchilds and comes out on foot through the fields to the door of Shellmound.

The Atlantic published EUDORA WELTY’S first contribution to its pages, her story “A Worn Path,” four years ago this month. That story was ultimately to receive an O. Henry Award. But more than that, it proclaimed the arrival of an American author in whom the South must take exceptional pride. In her middle thirties and as modest as she is talented, Miss Welty has this to say about her early career: —

A short story