Selections from The Collected Stories – Eudora Welty

Collected Stories, selections
Eudora Welty
(US, 1941-1963)

I don’t often read much in the way of short stories—though perhaps I should rectify that—but my in-person book club read a selection of the American Southern writer Eudora Welty’s short stories for our January meeting. The stories were a mix—some more humorous, some more tragic, often a mix of both. They were almost all very “southern” in tone, texture, characterization, and setting. “The Bride of Innisfallen” is a notable exception, with a cast of characters bound via train and then ferry en route from London to Cork, Ireland, as is “Circe,” a retelling of one of the episodes from The Odyssey, but from the woman’s perspective.

Place was clearly an important element. The stories were never set in just a generic US South, but in specific locations—towns, streets, buildings, trails—and mostly in Welty’s home state of Mississippi. Characters ranged across economic and racial spectrums. Clearly, Welty was an acute observer of human nature, and the stories she told feel grounded in a solid reality. She manifested an incredible ability in her stories to represent so many different viewpoints and perspectives, be it an elderly impoverished and nearly blind black grandmother, navigating her way through the equally treacherous waters of the forested path she must take and her dealings with local white folk who may be more dangers still (“A Worn Path”), or a bigoted white man who takes it into his head that he needs to kill a local civil rights leader (“Where is the Voice Coming From?”).

My particular favorites were “Why I Live at the P.O.,” “Powerhouse,” “A Worn Path,” “The Wide Net,” and “Moon Lake,” however, on reflection—both in this writing, and on attending book club—I realize that I have only scratched the surface of Welty’s writing, both in quantity, but, perhaps more importantly, in my understanding of the reading, skimming the surface without diving beneath. Clearly, I have more to explore.

Stories read:
“Petrified Man”
“Why I Live at the P.O.”
“The Hitch-Hikers”
“A Curtain of Green”
“Death of a Traveling Salesman”
“Powerhouse”
“A Worn Path”
“The Wide Net”
“The Purple Hat”
“Livvie”
“Moon Lake”
“The Bride of Innisfallen”
“Circe”
“Where is the Voice Coming From?”