Eudora Welty's Essay Place In Fiction

Eudora Welty (b.1909)
In her essay titled Place in Fiction, Eudora Welty spoke of her work as filled with the spirit of place: “Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course.” Both her outwardly uneventful life and her writing are most intimately connected to the topography and atmosphere, the season and the soil of the native Mississippi that has been her lifelong home.
Born in Jackson in 1909, to parents who came from the North, and raised in comfortable circumstances, she attended Mississippi State College for Women, then graduated from the University of Wisconsin in1929. After a course in advertising at the Columbia University School of Business, she returned to Mississippi, first working as a radio writer and newspaper society editor, then

Over the next two years, six of her stories were published in the southern Review, a serious literary magazine one of whose editors was the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren. She also received strong support from Katherine Anne Porter, who contributed an introduction to Welty’s first book of stories, A Curtain of Green (1941). That introduction hailed the arrival of another gifted southern fiction writer, and in fact the volume contained some of the best stories she was ever to write, such as Petrified man. Her profusion of metaphor and the difficult surface of her narrative-often oblique and indirect in its effect-were in part a mark of her admiration for modern writers like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Although Welty’s stories were as shapely as her mentor’s, Porter, they were more richly idiomatic and comic in their inclination. A second collection, The Wide Net, appeared two years later; and her first novel, The Robber Bridegroom, was published in