Why I Live at the P.O.
by Eudora Welty
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I found this story to be trivial and thus hard to appreciate.
I also object to the over-exuberant style.
The story recounts what happens one Fourth of July in a family in a little town called China Grove after the narrator’s sister separates from her husband and moves back home.
The narrator/postmistress decides to move into her post office and live there, apparently to escape from her family and get some peace and quiet.
I won’t go into the details of the story’s content – I will restrict myself to saying that I found it neither interesting or entertaining.
I also object to the over-exuberant style.
The story recounts what happens one Fourth of July in a family in a little town called China Grove after the narrator’s sister separates from her husband and moves back home.
The narrator/postmistress decides to move into her post office and live there, apparently to escape from her family and get some peace and quiet.
I won’t go into the details of the story’s content – I will restrict myself to saying that I found it neither interesting or entertaining.
I loved this story. Back in college I took a lit class and the prof assigned a lot of southern writers to read. Eudora Welty was one of them. She was so funny! I felt like I was in Mississippi.
Nobody does Southern humor better than Eudora Welty. I think some of the bickering when I was young was caused by that infernal heat.
You Can Read it HERE
You Can Read it HERE
My review, and some interesting comments, is on an anthology that includes the story, HERE.
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Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, Mississippi, and at the University of Wisconsin. She moved to New York in 1930 to study advertising at the Columbia University business school. After her father's death, she moved back to Jackson in 1931. She show more held various jobs on local newspapers and at a radio station before becoming a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program. Travelling through the state of Mississippi opened her eyes to the misery of the great depression and resulted in a series of photographs, which were exhibited in a one-women show in New York in 1936 and were eventually published as One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression in 1971. She stopped working for the WPA in 1936. Her first stories, Magic and Death of a Travelling Salesman, were published in small magazines in 1936. Some of her better-known short stories are Why I Live at the P.O., Petrified Man, and A Worn Path. Her short story collections include A Curtain of Green, The Golden Apples, The Wide Net and Other Stories, and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories. Her first novel, The Robber Bridegroom, was published in 1942. Her other novels include Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, and The Optimist's Daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. She received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972. Her nonfiction works include A Snapshot Album, The Eye of the Storm: Selected Essays and Reviews, and One Writer's Beginnings. She died from complications following pneumonia on July 23, 2001 at the age of 92. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Penguin 60s (57)
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Has as a student's study guide
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Why I Live at the P.O.
- Alternate titles
- Death of a traveling salesman; Shower of gold; Where is the voice coming from?
- Disambiguation notice
- This Penguin 60s collection contains four stories: "Why I Live at the P.O."; "Death of a Travelling Salesman"; "Shower of Gold"; and "Where is the Voice Coming From?" Please do not combine it with any single story, or ... (show all)with any larger collections.
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- Reviews
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- Languages
- English
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- Paper
- ISBNs
- 1
- ASINs
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