The home and garden of internationally acclaimed author Eudora Welty

Significance of the Eudora Welty House
The house at 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson is the house where Eudora Welty lived for over seventy-five years and where she wrote almost all of her fiction and essays. The accretions of memory, which she called "the treasure most dearly regarded by me," fed her stories, characters, landscapes, and dialogue. With the gift of the house, she emphasized that it was the house of her family, a family that honored books and reading. She did not want a "house about her," but about literature and the arts in our culture.

Freeman Tilden in Interpreting Our Heritage writes that historic sites offer an education "superior in some respects to that of the classroom, for here [the visitor] meets the Thing Itself." The Eudora Welty House will be one of the most intact literary houses in America in terms of authenticity. Its exterior, interior, and furnishings are as they were: paintings and photographs, objets d’art, linens, furniture, draperies, rugs, and above all, hundreds of books are in their original places. With virtually every wall lined with books, this house of a reader, a family of readers, shows how intensely family members valued the written word. The library includes works produced by the best minds of the twentieth century and by classic writers through the ages.

Educational Mission
Programming at the Welty House will stress Eudora Welty’s passion for language and her exploration of issues crucial to individual identity and experience. Welty’s lectures as part of The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the history of American Civilization at Harvard University were published as One Writer’s Beginnings in 1984. (It was the first bestseller for Harvard University Press). An autobiographical work, it describes the importance and craft of reading, observing, and writing. She had a deep capacity for observing life, sensitivity for receiving its impressions, and tough-minded, complex vision which she transferred onto the pages of her fiction. Robert Penn Warren wrote of Welty, "[She has] a temperament so strongly and significantly itself that it can face the multiplicity of the world." On the publication in the New Yorker of the story, "The Demonstrators," Jesse Jackson wrote to the magazine: "Eudora Welty’s ‘The Demonstrators’ was so true and powerful that it makes me weep for my people..." Welty’s body of fiction reflecting woman’s experience in twentieth-century America is increasingly studied by feminist scholars. (Her work is prominently featured in Patricia Yaeger’s study of southern women writers, Dust and Desire, University of Chicago, which won the 2001 Holman Award as best book in southern studies.)

In her writing, photography, and personal life, she fulfilled her “continuing wish to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight." Her keen sensitivity and intelligence inform the educational goals of our programming.

Conclusion
With the Eudora Welty House, Mississippi Department of Archives and History joins with approximately sixty-five other literary houses in the nation in the serious task of interpreting our national literary heritage. Literary houses hold a special place in the historic fabric of our nation by preserving the literate past and encouraging the future of our intellectual and literary life. The challenge of such houses is to use their evocative power as a catalyst for contemporary provocative programming.

The Eudora Welty House and its programming will continue the legacy of Eudora Welty’s striking intellect and creative powers, her devotion to the humanities, the importance of literature to our lives and of writers to our society. For seven decades in her home at 1119 Pinehurst Street she wrote stories, novels, essays, and book reviews of quiet power and discernment. Her selection in 1998 as the first living American writer to be published by the Library of America attests to her impact and importance. The prestigious Library of America is a non-profit publisher dedicated “to preserving the works of America’s greatest writers.” With her selection Welty joined the ranks of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Thoreau, Washington Irving, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, F.Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner.

Miss Welty’s words of 1954 seem current a half century later: "Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth." She believed in her medium, so do we.