Eudora Welty Research Fellowship, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Summer 2011

Abstract

In the six weeks this past summer that I spent doing research in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, I read through seventyone folders (not counting correspondence) in thirty-seven boxes, and I took a little less than a hundred pages of notes. What I came to realize is that in terms of the possibilities for scholarship available within the Welty collection, I had barely scratched the surface. M y archival searches mainly fell into three categories: manuscript changes, correspondence, and personal stories. I read through the manuscripts for Delta Wedding and The Optimist’s Daughter, noting changes or notes written by Welty in the margins. I read the letters spanning the time Welty was writing Delta Wedding and The Optimist’s Daughter and experiencing life during World War II, her mother’s illness, and after her mother and brothers’ deaths. These were also primarily letters from Katherine Ann Porter and letters to Diarmuid Russell and John Robinson from 1941–46, letters from Diarmuid and letters to Mary Lou Aswell, Frank Lyell, and Kenneth Millar from around 1957–1973. I finished my time in the archives by reading various drafts of One Writer’s Beginnings, and I focused a good bit on chronicling the stories or excerpts that did not end up in the lectures or the book. Manuscript changes My love, appreciation for, and understanding of Delta Wedding and The Optimist’s Daughter were exponentially enhanced by seeing them come together from short stories to novels and looking at the numerous drafts between. Tracing the changes—what was added and what was taken out—and when they were made forced me to wrestle with the question “Why?”—why were the changes made? In answering the why, I was left with subsequent questions, such as: how do these changes enhance or alter the story or my reading of it? What value can a reader gain from these changes? And ultimately, what impact, if any, do these changes have on the role of