Thirteen Stories

Eudora Welty

Chapters (18)

Copyright

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For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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“The Bride of the Innisfallen,” originally appeared in the New Yorker.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-14703

ISBN 0-15-689969-8 (Harvest: pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-547-54572-1
v3.0920

Introduction

This volume contains a selection of representative and enduring stories written by Eudora Welty over a period of some twenty-five years.

Miss Welty’s training in her craft was the sort described by Robert Frost as taking place “cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books.” Her father, originally from Ohio, was president of a Southern insurance company, and her mother was a West Virginian of Virginia stock; they were kindly and understanding parents. A sensitive and imaginative girl, she grew up in a free and easy way in Jackson, Mississippi, attending the public schools, reading omnivorously, fancying for a number of years that she wanted to be a painter. Following her graduation from Central High School in Jackson, she spent two years at Mississippi State College for Women, in Columbus, and another two at the University of Wisconsin, where as an English major she began a more concentrated study of literature. After having received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1929, she enrolled in the School of Business at Columbia University in order to study advertising. But the Depression had begun; she was unable to find suitable employment, and soon returned to Mississippi. For the next nine years she worked at various jobs in advertising and publicity, as well as at her own writing. Her first full-time job was with the Works Progress Administration; as a publicity assistant, she traveled all over Mississippi, writing newspaper copy, taking photographs, observing, talking to all sorts of people, and so acquiring material for many of her stories.

She offered to various New York publishers a group of unposed photographs of Negro life, “thinking or hoping,” she later said, “if they liked my pictures (which I thought were fine) they might be inclined to take my stories (which I felt very dubious about, but I wondered about them—they being what I cared about), but they weren’t decoyed. Once a year for three or four years I carried around the two bundles under my arm on my two weeks’ trip to New York, and carried them home again—not much downcast, perhaps because all the time I simply loved writing, and was going to do it anyway.”