Home By Dark --- Day 5/275

Walk: Marin Driving Day, PGCC
Distance: 3.5 miles


Eudora Welty (1901-2001, Jackson, MS), Home By Dark, Yalobusha County, 1936

Ciwt so admires Eudora Welty's writing.  The Mississippi author deservedly won a Pulitizer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, many O. Henry Awards AND the Medal of Freedom.  But Ciwt was amazed to learn today that, before she published a single one of her many short stories, she had a one-woman show of her photographs.

The pictures, taken soon after Welty left graduate school and returned to her beloved Jackson, Mississippi, show the rural poor in a state with Sundown Town Laws. Welty's personal place in society was very different, but her empathy and wide-ranging curiosity were not.  It was these qualities that marked her stunningly remarkable writing.

This is how close Ciwt has ever gotten to Welty: she once had an email program called "Eudora."  It was a free and marvelous program named in honor of WElty and admired and proudly used by writers all over the world.  One sad day it went dark.