Why I Live at the P.O.

Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1929, Welty worked as a photographer. Her writing was published in a variety of venues, and she was prominent in the worlds of both radio and newspaper before her fiction found a publishing home.

The recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships during the 1940s, Welty traveled to several European countries, including England, Ireland, and Germany. She was published in the Library of America and won several prominent awards during her lifetime, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1973 for The Optimist’s Daughter and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

Welty is known for short stories and novels set in the American South. Her first short story, “The Death of a Traveling Salesman,” was included in the 1936 issue of Manuscript. Her first published short story collection, A Curtain of Green, includes “Why I Live at the P.O.” Unusual for the time, three of the volume’s stories centered around Black characters. Author Toni Morrison commented that Welty’s writing was “about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing—it’s the way they should be written about” (Marrs, Suzanne.