Monday, March 07, 2011

Walker Percy and Eudora Welty on Firing Line

Still under the weather but back at work. Maybe I'll feel like reading again soon.

Until then...I saw Mel's post at The Reading Life on a couple of Eudora Welty's short stories, "Worn Path" and "Lily and the Three Ladies". For those interested in Welty or "Worn Path", there is an interview with Welty on "Worn Path" (as well as a dramatization of it on YouTube...I haven't watched it so I can't comment on it).

In Win Riley's documentary on Walker Percy (just released) he includes video footage from a Firing Line episode with Percy and Welty as guests. I'm guessing because of legal issues, though, there were only a few video shots. (This sums up a lot of my feelings toward the documentary--good, but...) I found the Firing Line episode listed at the Hoover Institution: 12/12/1972 The Southern Imagination with Welty, Percy and others. The transcript is available for download (Update: I checked the Hoover Institution's site on 28 Feb 2016 and the transcript is not available). A few quotes:

Welty: ... I think their [young Southern writers'] eyes are no longer self-conscious. I mean the art of writing as a Southerner would now be a self-conscious thing to do, don't you think? It never used to be. When we were coming along we just wrote because this is where we lived and what we knew.



Buckley: Do your books sell well in the South, compared to other parts of the country?
Welty: Oh, they don't sell well anywhere.


Welty: I once did a story--I was writing a novel at the time, and when Medgar Evers was assassinated here--that night, it just pushed up to what I was doing. I thought to myself, "I've lived here all my life. I know the kind of mind that did this"--this was before anyone was caught. So I wrote a story in the first person as the murderer...

2 comments:

Mel u said...

thank you very much for your mention and I hope you feel better soon-

Dwight said...

Eh, I'm working on it. I'm not sure why this cold is dragging out so long.

Thanks for reviewing some of Welty's stories...it gave me the push to look some of these things up.