Eudora Welty in Madison

“Eudora Welty in Madison: The Southern author spent two little-known years at UW,” published by Isthmus (Madison), July 2001

With the death of author Eudora Welty last week at age 92, much was made of her long years in Jackson, Mississippi. Little, by comparison, was made of her time in Madison (obituaries published in the Wisconsin State Journal and Capital Times made almost no mention of it). And little should have been made. “That Eudora left such a small footprint at Wisconsin is remarkable, and is perhaps [an] indication of deep depression,” her biographer, Ann Waldron, writes. Yet Welty’s time here proved in other ways formative and exhilarating.

After two bustling years at Mississippi State College for Women (now Mississippi University for Women), Welty, anxious to leave Mississippi, transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1927. It was her second choice. Welty would later recall: “I was sent to the Middle West. I was very timid and shy, younger than the rest, and those people there seemed to me like sticks of flint, that live in the icy world.”

Welty experienced the UW as an outsider. She was one of the few Southern students on campus. Excluded from campus dorms that were reserved for Wisconsin students, she took up residence in a strictly regulated rooming house at 625 North Francis Street, near Lake Mendota. She chose not to join a sorority. She didn’t date. Even her fur coat was possum.

Of course, there is more to college than dorms and dances and dating. Welty majored in English, minoring in Art History. “In the winter afternoons when the snow kept falling,” she recalled in a 1940 letter, “I used to sit in the stacks in the library in the Celtic division reading all the books they had of A.E. [George Russell] and Mr. Yeats and copying things into a notebook, not for use, but just to have.”

“At length,” she wrote in her 1984 autobiography, “I learned the word for the nature of what I had come upon in reading Yeats. Mr. Ricardo Quintana lecturing to his class on Swift and Donne used it in its true meaning and import. The word is passion.”

Quintana, an assistant professor also new to Madison in 1927, would have a powerful influence on Welty. “He really made us realize the strength and truth of poetic feeling and depth of feeling and emotional drive,” Welty recalled in a 1978 interview. “I saw what a vast force literature was and the seriousness of the whole thing. It was exhilarating. It really opened the door to me.”

Still, Welty left Madison without any obvious literary intentions, continuing her studies at the Columbia Graduate School of Business. By 1936 she was back in her home town of Jackson, publishing her first short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” and establishing a long career that won her the attentions of scholarly communities and a large reading public. She twice won the American Book Award, in 1961 and 1984. Her 1973 novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, set in the South like much of her work, won a Pulitzer Prize.

While Eudora Welty had helped found the first literary magazine at Mississippi State College for Women, she remained in the shadows, so to speak, in the literary life of the University of Wisconsin. In her four semesters here she scarcely asserted herself as a writer of prose or poetry. Her sole foray into the literary realm was in the Wisconsin Literary Magazine, with a poem published late in her junior year titled “Shadows.”

Even candle-snuffers rust-(snared in candle smoke)
Inevitably-
Irretrievably-
shadows are smeared into laughter,
Mountains die,
Dreams are smothered in their sleep,
And beauty goes out with the wind
Through the cracks in the night.