Welty, Spencer, and Creekmore Added to Special Collections, Georgia State University

I continue to add books to Georgia State University’s collection of first editions by Eudora Welty and by authors associated with her. Recently I “filled out” Special Collections’ Elizabeth Spencer holdings, and tried to assemble the complete published works of Hubert Creekmore, her long-time friend and sister-in-law’s brother. The Welcome (1948) by Creekmore, however, is a true rarity. Perhaps because it is an early novel dealing with a homosexual affair, it has been sought after by collectors in that genre. Whatever the reason, booksellers I contacted haven’t seen a copy in five years or more.

Eudora Welty

Welty, Eudora. Retreat. Winston-Salem: Palaemon, 1981. Proof, signed.

———. My Introduction to Katherine Anne Porter. The Georgia Review (1990). Offprint, signed.

[Welty, Eudora]. Photograph by Jo Ragsdale, Jackson, MS.

[Welty, Eudora]. Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine 21.2 (February 2011). Containing “Collecting Eudora Welty: Eudora Welty: A Checklist of First and Notable Editions” by John Soward Bayne. 14–25.

Elizabeth Spencer

Elizabeth Spencer, born in Carrollton, Mississippi, in 1921, was a student at Belhaven College, across the street from Welty’s house, when in 1942 as president of the college’s literary society, she invited Welty to speak to the group. Afterwards Welty became a good friend (Spencer 167–68). After Belhaven (BA, 1942), she studied at Vanderbilt (MA, 1943).

Spencer is a novelist and story writer, and winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and five O. Henry awards. Her 1960 novel Light in the Piazza was adapted as a movie with Olivia de Havilland in 1962 and a successful Broadway light opera in 2003. Retired from the University of North Carolina, she lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Welty provided blurbs for Fire in the Morning (1948), This Crooked Way (1952), and The Voice at the Back Door (1956), and they appeared together at various literary festivals (Polk 393, 395). Spencer wrote the introduction to Welty’s last book, Country Churchyards (2000).

The following books complete GSU Library Special Collections’ “Spencer shelf”; first editions in dust jackets of her other books were already there.

Spencer, Elizabeth. Fire in the Morning. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1948. First edition in dust jacket. Blurb by Welty.

———. This Crooked Way. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952. First edition in dust jacket. Blurb by Welty.

———. Knights & Dragons. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. First edition in dust jacket. Signed.

———. Ship Island and Other Stories. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. First edition in dust jacket. Dedicated to Eudora Welty.

———. The Snare. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. First edition in dust jacket.

———.Marilee. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1981. First edition (300) in quarter cloth and boards, no dust jacket. Numbered (273) and signed.

———. On the Gulf with the Art of Walter Anderson. Author and Artist Series. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991. First edition in dust jacket.

———. On the Gulf with the Art of Walter Anderson. Author and Artist Series. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991. Signed limited edition.

———. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Signed paperback.

Hubert Creekmore

Hubert Creekmore (16 January 1907–23 May 1966) was a close friend and Pinehurst Street neighbor of Welty’s, and ultimately a family member: Welty’s brother Walter married Creekmore’s sister Mittie in 1939. Creekmore was born in Water Valley, Mississippi, and moved to Jackson in the nineteen twenties (Howell 246). He studied at the University of Mississippi (BA, 1927), then at the University of Colorado and Yale, and he completed a master’s degree at Columbia in 1940.

Creekmore was a member of the Night-Blooming Cereus Club, and it is he who recommended that she submit stories to Manuscript, where her first published stories appeared (Marrs, One 9, 11). In 1934 he started a little magazine in Jackson—very short-lived—called Southern Review, for which Welty worked as proofreader and ad-seller (Burger 181). Welty and Creekmore shared an interest in photography as well as writing, and both had stories published in the inaugural issue of River in March 1937. Both worked for the Federal Writers’ Project of the...