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Transcription: [00:10:08]
The entire time that we have this narrative, we're not finding Eudora Welty beating us over the head with their ugliness,
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but with their humanity. They just happen to be on the ugly side of things.
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And poor Laurel, who is having to engage this. We don't find laurel combatant, she's tolerant.
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And like I said, it's just a very, very sympathetic take of woman who's in the crisis of the time of her father's death.
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I think I skipped over part of the biography, but we'll get back to that in just a little bit.
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Eudora Walty's South is this gothic south, it's this study of, southern character, but this character we can take and put anywhere.
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You see characters like this in Chekhov, you see characters like this in Shakespeare. The, this humanity that's at work.
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I know everybody, if you haven't read it, I'm pretty sure you've heard of "Why I Live at the P.O.".
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"Why I Live at the PO" is a battle between a sister and her other sister,
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who's returned home with an adopted child, it happened when she was on this, she picked up this child on the road.
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She calls the child Shirley D. The story of, it's a very brief story that occurs over, over a morning, a day
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With a drunk uncle, running around a house, trying to get the granddad out of the hammock, and these characters are just yelling at each other.
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There's a battle going on. It's kind of a sensitive and comedic stare at a fun little family
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in another moment of crisis. Someone moved in with a kid, and I've only got 2 chickens to feed five people, now 2 more. Alright.
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Let's get back to Ms. Welty for another minute or two.
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Something that I want to point out again, is her success over a long, long period.
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She published, beginning in her twenties and continued to work,
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They say that, growing up in the South, you know, we'd hear rumors, if you go down to Jackson, Mississippi,
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you can drive by her house down on Pine, I think it was at Pinehurst. I think it was 1113 Pinehurst.
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Drive by her house, see her typing in her windows. But she was aware of her success. She began delivering her, her works and her papers to the State Archives and in the mid-1950's.
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And then she made plans in the 1980's to give her house over to the state of Mississippi.
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She was modestly aware of her success, but, you know, they say also that, you know, you'd see her shopping in the Jitney Jungle down there.
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So she was just a, just an average person who happened to be an exceptional writer. From one writer's beginnings