Table Of ContentThe 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
Description:This valuable & extensive guide is an annotated listing of all the materials in the Eudora Welty collection of the Mississippi Dept. of Archives & History. Almost all the materials in the collected were donated by Welty to her native state, including manuscripts, correspondence, & documentary photos
