Eudora Welty died last week at the age of 92. A prolific writer of short stories and novels, she was a southern woman who spun commonplace Mississippi into art.
“Passion is the chief ingredient of good fiction,” she once said. “It flames right out of sympathy for the human condition and goes into all great writing.” Welty’s writing has been called mythological, post-modern, timeless, transcendent, rich in region and inseparable from the community she lived in and observed throughout her life.
As the South of sitting on the porch and telling stories disappears, replaced by chain stores and suburban malls, will the themes that resonated through her literature go with it?
Guests:
Shannon Ravenel, co-founder of Algonquin Books and editor of “New Stories from the South”;
Lee Smith, novelist and short story writer;
Jill McCorkle, novelist and author of the new collection of short stories called “Creatures of Habit.”