New Introductions to Welty's Works: A Contemporary Reframing

In the past couple of years, four new editions of Eudora Welty's work have appeared with introductions written by Ann Patchett, Natasha Trethewey, and Anne Tyler. If the art of an introduction is to pique the reader's interest in the work that follows, the reader of these introductions will receive the extra delight of reading how a writer reads another writer. Welty's writing career actually started with such an introduction. When Eudora Welty was just beginning, she had the good fortune to become friends with the established writer Katherine Anne Porter. Welty was, of course, pleased when Porter agreed to write the introduction to her collection of stories, A Curtain of Green. Michael Kreyling explains that it was "the first such introduction Porter had ever consented to write" (63). Porter's essay was not just her stamp of approval; she also shaped the portrait of the artist for readers not yet familiar with Welty's work. To Porter, Welty was a "born writer" without the bother of studying writing in college or belonging to a "literary group" (5). Porter also slyly makes Welty's ordinary middle-class background unconventional by opposing it to the narrative of "hardships and strokes of luck" that seemed to be the current "conventions of an American author's life" (3). Of the writing itself, Porter says that Welty "has simply an eye and an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork" (10). Porter sums up the key merit in the collection as the existence "even in the smallest story [of] a sense of power in reserve which makes me believe firmly that, splendid beginning that this is, it is only the beginning" (12). The four recent editions of Welty's work provide evidence of Porter's prophecy.

While Porter was kindly supporting a relatively unknown artist, Patchett, Trethewey, and Tyler write from the opposite angle, reassessing the works of an author now well established in the canon and introducing her to a new generation of readers. Patchett writes the introduction for a 2019 edition of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.¹ Trethewey writes introductions for the 2019 edition of Eudora Welty: Photographs and the 2020 edition of One Writer's Beginnings. Tyler contributes an introduction for the 2020 edition of Delta Wedding.² All three describe the impact of encountering Welty's work at a young age, and they each point to Welty's focus on ordinary White and Black people from Mississippi as helpful in seeing themselves as potential writers.

Ann Patchett speaks of reading "A Visit of Charity" when she was twelve, identifying with the main character Marian, even though she realized that she is largely an "unsympathetic centerpiece" (xi). Older now, Patchett feels akin to the women in the nursing home whom Marian visits. The story's initial impact on Patchett, though, derived from the simple fact of Welty's existence: "When I was young, English textbooks were dominated by dead male writers, and Welty distinguished herself in my mind not only for her unsetting tale of charity, but also for being neither a man nor dead" (xii). Welty was so much alive that later, when Patchett was seventeen, she saw Welty give a reading and had her sign her book, "thereby stopping my heart" (xii). That faint-of-heart teenager has now authored seven novels and four works of nonfiction.

Although Natasha Trethewey cannot "recall when [she] first read One Writer's Beginnings," it was when she was young (ix).³ She had lost her mother and felt "that great loss was pushing me toward some necessary articulation, toward becoming a writer" (ix). She remembers seeking "a connection with a writer from my native geography, from my Mississippi" and identified how "Welty begins as we all do, rooted in a particular time and place" (x). Trethewey then received her first copy of Eudora Welty: Photographs during her first year of graduate school when she was writing poems about her grandmother. She found Welty's volume "transformative" in showing her Mississippi in the 1930s, a "record of what...