On Friday, June 10, I’ll be discussing the late, great Eudora Welty at Granta’s Truly Yours, Eudora Welty: An Evening on Writing and Influence with editor Patrick Ryan and writer Sheri Holman. Rhonda Keyser will read the job application letter Welty sent to the New Yorker as a young woman, in 1933.
“Gentlemen,” it begins, “I suppose you’d be more interested in even a slight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.”
Among other things, we’ll be talking about the wonderful What There Is to Say We Have Said, a collection of Welty’s correspondence with William Maxwell. I first learned of Eudora Welty in a class with Harry Crews, and later read her stories and then her novels. A few years ago I discovered that one of her books, Delta Wedding, is set at a Mississippi plantation that my great-grandfather (later) ran.
See also Lorrie Moore on Welty and “the beautiful deformities of invention”; the (possible) first mention of tire planters in literature; and Eudora Welty audio.