First Person Singular by Wendy Braitman

filed in Single Women's Hall of Fame, Who Are We?

Marriage, Eudora Welty said, “Never Came Up.”

April 13, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

(“Sunday Morning,” photograph by Eudora Welty)

Before her literary career took off, Eudora Welty, one of the great writers of the 20th century, used to snap photos. She had a job as a junior publicity agent for  the W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration, started by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, to jump start the economy) and traveled through rural Mississippi, taking pictures of people coping with the Depression.

Her Depression photographs were exhibited in New York in 1936, at around the same time she sold her first story, “The Death of the Traveling Salesman,” and again most recently a few months ago at the Museum of the City of New York. “Photography,” Ms. Welty said, “taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.”

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson Mississippi on April 13, 1909, and lived most of her life in the family homes she grew up in. When asked why she never married, the prolific Ms. Welty, who died at the age of 92, said, “it never came up.”

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