Eudora Welty's Use of Myth in "Death of a Traveling Salesman"

Abstract

IN 1936 Eudora Welty, a yet unpublished author, sent a short story and a letter to the editors of a small periodical entitled Manuscript.l The short story, Death of a Traveling Salesman, was published along with the letter in the June issue of the magazine. In the letter she explains her situation: Just now I am in New York while a one man show of my photographs goes on at the Lugene Gallery here. The pictures are from a collection of three hundred unposed studies I made of Mississippi Negroes. I did the job out of pure interest, but it broke me, so I hope a publisher here will buy them.... In Mississippi there is a lot still to be written. When I had taken these photographs, for a while I lost interest in writing stories that took place in Paris, although I admit they concerned things that could not have happened anywhere. In this one year I seem to have got my bearings. Now to sound them out.2 Welty, after some artistic floundering, has finally found a suitable approach to the short story. The story itself offers definite proof that she now knows her way. This first story, which stands with only a few stylistic revisions among her more mature work in the collection A Curtain of Green, is as frequently anthologized as any of her later stories. The approach she used in this first story is the one that she has used again and again in both short stories and novels.