When Eudora Welty first found success publishing her short stories, she was lumped into the loosely defined genre of Southern Gothic (a characterization she would much later infamously reject with uncharacteristic lack of ambiguity.) Once the constraints of that school of writing clearly no longer applied, she was allowed in as a member of the Southern Renaissance despite producing a body work more at home with the generation of post-Renaissance writers more accurately termed as being influenced by rather than an actual part of that literary movement. By the last quarter of the 20th century, Welty’s significance in literary history had finally been separated from the significance of the South as the setting of most of her fiction. For many critics and scholars, it took her death in 2001 to finally pass the torch of “America’s Greatest Living Writer” on to someone else.
Welty is a prime example of the inevitable trap to which most “regional writers” inevitably fall into and depend upon the whims of critics and academics to help pull them out of. Bret Harte was at one time more famous than Mark Twain, his rival as the best “regional writer” producing stories of the characters on the wild frontier west of the Mississippi. Today, Harte is still a regional writer, while Twain was one of Welty’s predecessors enjoying the title of America’s Greatest Living Writer. Like Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor managed to make the transition from Southern Gothic to next-general Southern Renaissance, but neither ever came close to carrying that grand title she shared with Twain.
What is most extraordinary, perhaps, of how Eudora Welty managed to spend much of the last 25 years of her life either referred to America’s Greatest Living Writer or one of America’s greatest writers (living or dead) is that she essentially produced no new fiction during that period. In other words, her legacy was elevated from regional consideration to national consideration based precisely on those writings which had limited the view of critics for so long.
Another example of the pitfalls of placing such vital value on place. In one of her non-fictional works, Welty wrote that the nature of fiction “is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place.” Welty and the South are inextricably linked, but when one recalls those stories, chances are most readers cannot identify the precise setting of any story. Take, for instance, two of the most anthologized and familiar stories in not just Welty’s canon, but in the canon of American literature: “A Worn Path” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” In what specific town do these two stories take place? It’s not a trick question: the answers appears twice in “A Worn Path” and the name of the city that appears in the address on the letters arriving at the post office where Sister now lives is mentioned five different times.
But few if any actually recall the names of those towns. Because while Welty may set her story in Mississippi or some nearby southern state, the stories are not about place, but the feeling of those places. The worn path traversed by Phoenix Jackson is set in the town of Natchez. The feeling inspired by that name is closely related to the Natchez Trace, one of those oldest historical trails in America. The address on the letters arriving at the post office where Sister has taken up residence is China Grove, a name for a small Mississippi town as out of sync as Sister seems to be among her family. Two of the most famous and most read stories ever written by this writer so intensely connected with the setting of her works and yet the actual setting of those stories are likely the least-remembered elements about them.
It took critics a good thirty or forty years to realize that Welty was never a regional writer at all. Her stories—not just the two most famous mentioned above—may predominantly be set within the confines of a narrow geographic setting, but she wasn’t writing about the place. She was writing about the feelings those places inspired in her characters. And as Welty proves again and again—whether writing about middle-aged traveling salesmen or teenage Campfire Girls or gossiping beauty parlor workers—feelings may be bound up in place, but they are universal experiences that transcend geography. What happens in Welty’s Mississippi does not stay there because readers from Oxford, England to Heidelberg, Germany to Sebastopol, Australia can relate with understanding and conviction.
