Eudora Welty: A Gentle Provocateur

She is such a gentle provocateur, ably and perfectly leading you toward the truth of people and places. Eudora's fiction has the effect of placing you in a warm bed on a cold night, tightly placed, secure, but the knowledge of the bedtime story she has told you leads to horrific nightmares, because she has laced your dreams with truth. You can believe, if you wish, that her stories are whimsical and Southern and genteel, but for me--perhaps because I am Southern--her paragraphs and sentences unfold before me like sheets of paper that are slowly dipped into a fluid until they become photographs, and the images are of me, of my family, of what, God help me, I have become.

Tennessee Williams on Eudora Welty

Interview with James Grissom

New Orleans

1982

© 2014 James Grissom