Eudora Welty's Mississippi
"I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."
In 2009, the literary world commemorated the centennial of Eudora Welty's birth. Her presence and influence on the literary world is still felt in her home state. In Jackson, Miss Welty's home on Pinehurst Street looks like she just stepped out for a trip to the Jitney #14 grocery store. The her home was carefully preserved by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and is exactly how she left it when she died.
The house is open as a museum with its comfortable aura of lived-in gentility tempered with the awe of walking through the rooms where she lived and wrote. A particular highlight is Eudora’s beloved garden, as colorful in every season as the characters that fill her novels and short stories.
As a youngster, Eudora took a short cut through the state Capitol on her roller skates on the way to school. Visit the Old George Street Grocery - now a lunch place by day, bar by night - and imagine a young Eudora picking up a Lake's Celery Soda on a hot day: “You drank on the premises, with feet set wide apart to miss the drip, and gave him back his bottle.”
As a photographer and writer for the WPA in the 1930s, she traveled the state gathering ideas and stories that continued to influence her the rest of her life.
Walk in Miss Eudora's shoes and explore the Mississippi she knew and loved.
Eudora Welty Primer - Reading List
A Worn Path
A Curtain of Green
The Golden Apples
Moon Lake and Other Stories
The Robber Bridegroom (novella)
Delta Wedding
The Ponder Heart
The Shoe Bird
The Optimist's Daughter
One Writer's Beginnings (autobiography)
The Southern Literary Trail
Mystic Mayonaise
"Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations."