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Welty’s writing is rooted in the places she knew best–small southern towns peopled with seemingly ordinary characters who love to talk and whose conversation reveals their complex and often wryly amusing interior lives. Many of her best-known and most frequently anthologized stories–such as “Why I Live at the P.O.” or “Petrified Man”–feature characters who seem to thrive on the tension and unpredictability that arises from teasing, taunting, or bickering with each other, yet who generally seem to be friends despite their differences. By dramatizing the ordinary and everyday conversations of her characters, Welty often demonstrates that differences can bring people together, just as much as they can tear them apart.
Welty won numerous literary awards in her lifetime, including three O’Henry prizes, a Pulitzer, the American Book Award, the Modern Language Association Commonwealth Award, and the National Medal of Arts. Her story “Why I Live at the P.O.” also inspired the developer of a popular email program to name his software after her. At the time of her death, Welty was considered by many to be the South’s greatest living writer.
[4672] Conrad A. Albrizio, The New Deal (1934),
courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (NLR).
A fresco of New York’s Leonardo Da Vinci Art School. Showing working people, the mural was dedicated to President Roosevelt and commissioned by the WPA. Work was an important theme in depression-era art.
[5169] Ben Shahn, Two Women Walking along Street, Natchez, Mississippi (1935),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF33-006093-M4 DLC].
Eudora Welty was born into a family of means in Mississippi in 1909 and resided there for most of her life. Welty rooted much of her work in the daily life of small southern towns.
[5524] Dorothea Lange, White Sharecropper Family, Formerly Mill Workers in the Gastonia Textile Mills. When the Mills Closed Down Seven Years Ago, They Came to This Farm Near Hartwell, Georgia (1937),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-018147-CDLC].
The less glamorous side of rural southern life; a white share-cropping family seated on the porch of their cabin. This family is an example of the poorer, “everyday people” that writers such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty focused on in their work.