The Welty Collection : A Guide to the Eudora Welty Manuscripts and Documents title: At the Mississippi Department of Archives and History author: Marrs, Suzanne.; Welty, Eudora publisher: University Press of Mississippi isbn10 | asin: 0878053662 print isbn13: 9780878053667 ebook isbn13: 9780585212296 language: English Welty, Eudora,--1909- --Manuscripts-- Catalogs, Manuscripts, American-- subject Mississippi--Jackson--Catalogs, Mississippi.--Dept. of Archives and History--Catalogs. publication date: 1988 lcc: Z6616.W454M37 1988eb ddc: 016.813/52 Welty, Eudora,--1909- --Manuscripts-- Catalogs, Manuscripts, American-- subject: Mississippi--Jackson--Catalogs, Mississippi.--Dept. of Archives and History--Catalogs. Page iii The Welty Collection A Guide to the Eudora Welty Manuscripts and Documents at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History by Suzanne Marrs UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI Jackson & London Page iv Copyright © 1988 by the University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 91 90 89 88 4 3 2 1 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by John A. Langston All illustrations are from the Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marrs, Suzanne. The Welty collection: a guide to the Eudora Welty manuscripts and documents at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History/by Suzanne Marrs. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-87805-366-2 (alk. paper) 1. Welty, Eudora, 1909-ManuscriptsCatalogs. 2. Manuscripts, AmericanMississippiJacksonCatalogs. 3. Mississippi. Dept. of Archives and HistoryCatalogs. I. Welty, Eudora, 1909 . II. Mississippi. Dept. of Archives and History. III. Title. Z6616.W454M37 1988 [PS3545.E6] 016.813'52dc19 88-17537 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available. Page v Contents Preface vii Chapter One Manuscripts 3 Chapter Two Photographs 77 Chapter Three Correspondence 146 Chapter Four Publications and Memorabilia 191 Chapter Five Secondary Materials 198 Appendix A Related Materials at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History 221 Appendix B A Handlist of Eudora Welty Manuscripts in Other Collections By Noel Polk 227 Works Cited In Introductions 233 Index 237 Page vii Preface In 1957, at the request of Charlotte Capers, Director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Eudora Welty began to donate manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, published works, and secondary works about her fiction to the department. She has continued and will continue to do so, and the result is a valuable, extensive, and expanding Eudora Welty Collection. In 1985 the Department of Archives and History invited me to reorganize and to write a guide to this collection; Patricia Carr Black, Madel Morgan, Christine Wilson, H. T. Holmes, Karin Den Bleyker, and other members of the archives staff provided me with valuable assistance and advice in this undertaking. Most important, Miss Welty herself generously answered my many questions about her manuscripts, photographs, and correspondence. Her conversations with me inform the introductory essays and annotations in this guide; the opportunity to work closely with Eudora Welty has been the most significant experience of my professional life. The Welty Collection: A Guide to the Eudora Welty Manuscripts and Documents at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History includes five chapters. Chapter one concerns manuscript holdings in the collection. Here I have listed and described typescripts of Welty's many books as well as typescripts of her uncollected and unpublished works; the annotated entries typically do not delineate the nature of revisions to individual typescripts, but I discuss the revisions at some length in the introduction to chapter one. Chapter two describes the negatives and printed photographs in the Welty Collection and includes commentary about selected photographs. Chapter three provides a calendar of the Welty correspondence, a summary of each letter, and an identification of the correspondents and of individuals mentioned in the letters. Chapter four lists the Welty publications that are part of the collection, and chapter five lists the secondary materials Welty has given to the Department of Archives and History. The guide concludes with appendixes citing other collections that are relevant to the study of Welty's fiction. This guide should make the Welty Collection readily accessible to scholars. It should also complement existing critical discussions of a Page viii remarkable career. Introductory essays to the first three chapters provide background information and comment on the value of the collection. The introduction to the manuscript holdings describes Welty's method of writing and comments on the extent and signficance of her revisions; the introduction to chapter two describes her work as a photographer, the equipment she relied upon, and the relation of her photographs to her fiction; and the introduction to the collected correspondence discusses the biographical significance of correspondence held in the Welty Collectionwhat it reveals about Welty's career, her friendships, her travels, and her fiction. The other chapters in this guide do not really need introductions. The Welty publications and the secondary materials held in the collection (see chapters four and five) have in large part been described in bibliographies by Noel Polk, Victor Thompson, and Pearl McHaney; those bibliographies also list published materials that are not part of the Welty Collection. Scholars interested in reviews of Welty's fiction, however, will find chapter five of signficance, and those interested in unpublished interviews and in Welty's letters to her friends Lehman Engel and Charlotte Capers will find appendix A useful. I am indebted to James West, Michael Kreyling, Noel Polk, R. Barbara Gitenstein, and Mary Hughes Brookhart for their advice on the final preparation of this guide, to my students Amy Haggblom, Jennifer Gibbs, and Barbara Adams for assistance in proofreading, to the State University of New York-Oswego for giving me time to complete this project, and to the Mississippi Committee for the Humanities for helping to fund my work. I am grateful to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for permission to quote from typescripts in the Eudora Welty Collection, to G. K. Hall for permission to use my essay "Eudora Welty's Photography: Images into Fiction," originally published in a slightly different form in Critical Essays on Eudora Welty, as the