Why I Live at the P.O., short story by Eudora Welty, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1941 and collected in A Curtain of Green (1941).

This comic monologue by Sister, a young woman in a small Mississippi town who has set up housekeeping in the post office to escape from her eccentric family, is a prime example of Southern Gothic writing. As Sister’s story of betrayal and injustice unfolds, the reader gradually becomes aware that Sister’s view of the world is as strange as that of the various members of her family. The narrow-minded and hostile characters are portrayed as cartoonish grotesques; at the same time, however, Welty’s accurate depiction of small-town Southern life lends an air of uncomfortable realism, and her perfectly nuanced dramatic monologue gives the story a wickedly funny air that has made it a classic of American literature.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.
Britannica Chatbot logo

Britannica Chatbot

Chatbot answers are created from Britannica articles using AI. This is a beta feature. AI answers may contain errors. Please verify important information in Britannica articles. About Britannica AI.

Eudora Welty (born April 13, 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, U.S.—died July 23, 2001, Jackson) was an American short-story writer and novelist whose work is mainly focused with great precision on the regional manners of people inhabiting a small Mississippi town that resembles her own birthplace and the Delta country.

Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, from which she graduated in 1929. During the Great Depression she was a photographer on the Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Mississippi, and photography remained a lifelong interest. Photographs (1989) is a collection of many of the photographs she took for the WPA. She also worked as a writer for a radio station and newspaper in her native Jackson, Mississippi, before her fiction won popular and critical acclaim.

Welty’s first short story was published in 1936, and thereafter her work began to appear regularly, initially in little magazines such as the Southern Review and later in major periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. Her readership grew steadily after the publication of A Curtain of Green (1941; enlarged 1979), a volume of short stories that contains two of her most anthologized stories—“The Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” In 1942 her short novel The Robber Bridegroom was issued, and in 1946 her first full-length novel, Delta Wedding. Her later novels include The Ponder Heart (1954), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), which won a Pulitzer Prize. The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are collections of short stories, and The Eye of the Story (1978) is a volume of essays. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty was published in 1980.

Welty’s main subject is the intricacies of human relationships, particularly as revealed through her characters’ interactions in intimate social encounters. Among her themes are the subjectivity and ambiguity of people’s perception of character and the presence of virtue hidden beneath an obscuring surface of convention, insensitivity, and social prejudice. Welty’s outlook is hopeful, and love is viewed as a redeeming presence in the midst of isolation and indifference. Her works combine humour and psychological acuity with a sharp ear for regional speech patterns.

One Writer’s Beginnings, an autobiographical work, was published in 1984. Originating in a series of three lectures given at Harvard, it beautifully evoked what Welty styled her “sheltered life” in Jackson and how her early fiction grew out of it.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Britannica Chatbot logo

Britannica Chatbot

Chatbot answers are created from Britannica articles using AI. This is a beta feature. AI answers may contain errors. Please verify important information in Britannica articles. About Britannica AI.