Eudora Welty’s “Magic”: A History of the Story

Eudora Welty’s first published story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” in the June issue, was received with loud praise by our readers. The present story is entirely different in theme, treatment, feeling—which goes to prove what we’ve known from the beginning, that Miss Welty is not a “one-story” writer.

(Note on the author, Manuscript Sept.–Oct. 1936)¹

Cover of the sheet music to Girl of My Dreams by Sunny Clapp, published by Jack Mills, Inc., New York, 1927.

Eudora Welty’s “Magic” is a gothic tale of a cemetery tryst between a telegram delivery boy and a stenography school student, both young city people in a community easily identified as Jackson, Mississippi. It is a well-plotted story, much of its drama recorded in the couple’s slangy dialect with the same daring Welty would apply to “Petrified Man.”² “Magic” was Welty’s third published story, and the second story published by the perceptive editor John Rood; this one, in the September–October 1936 issue of Manuscript, filled pages three to seven. Manuscript, a “little magazine” that sought to showcase promising new writers, was owned, edited, and published by Rood and his wife Mary Lawhead through “their own press, the Lawhead Press, in Athens, Ohio” (Welty, “Looking” 7). Welty had sent her first submissions for publication to John Rood at the suggestion of her Jackson friend and neighbor Hubert Creekmore, a published writer. Two years older than Welty, and later related to Welty by his sister’s marriage to her brother Walter, Creekmore had by 1934 published in Poetry and placed fiction in Story (Bain et al. 105). In recalling her first publication, which was “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” Welty revealed that she hadn’t even “risked showing” her stories to Creekmore, but sent them straightaway to several journals he had suggested (“Looking” 7).

That Creekmore had published fiction in Manuscript,³ The Tanager, and Mississippi’s own River: A Magazine of the Deep South (Hoffman 279, 339) seems to indicate that these are the magazines that he had suggested. None of these little magazines paid for stories, and of the three, the bimonthly Tanager had the longest life (1925–1938). Manuscript lasted for three years; River had only three issues: March, April, and June, 1937, but these included essays, fiction, and poetry by such later well-known writers as James K. Feibleman, George Marion O’Donnell, August Derleth, and Peter Taylor. Four of Welty’s early stories were published in these three short-lived literary magazines: “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Magic” were in Manuscript; “The Doll” appeared in June 1936 in The Tanager, a college magazine of Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, edited in 1936 by Carl Niemeyer (Welty, “The Doll” 25); and “Retreat”⁴ was published by Dale Mullen in River: A Magazine of the Deep South (Oxford, Mississippi) in March 1937.

Three of these first four Welty stories were not included in her first short-story collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941), nor were they included by Welty in a collection titled Stories that she circulated to publishers beginning in 1939. They do not, therefore, appear in her Collected Stories (1980), either, and until its publication in the Summer 2004 issue of the Eudora Welty Newsletter, “Magic” is the only one of the four never reprinted at all. In 1981, Palaemon Press Limited published “Retreat” and, for its A Tribute to Eudora Welty issue, The Georgia Review reprinted “The Doll” in 1999. Other stories that were either unpublished (“Acrobats in the Park”) or uncollected after the first publication (“Hello and Good-Bye”) have by now also been published.⁵

When Welty sent “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Magic” to John Rood at Manuscript, she received an enthusiastic acceptance of both stories by March 19, 1936 (Marrs 157). In the “Correspondence Calendar” for The Welty Collection, Suzanne Marrs quotes Rood as telling Welty that “Death of a Salesman” is “one of the best stories we have ever read,” and she paraphrases [End Page...