Eudora Welty and Modern Media

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Stephen M. Fuller, Ebony Lumumba, Pearl McHaney, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Kaitlyn Smith, Matthew D. Sutton, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Keri Watson

As a child, Eudora Welty rode trains, listened to music on her parents' Victrola, and absorbed the magic of early sound technology. In her twenties, she developed a passion for photography and supported Mississippi’s first radio station, WJDX—founded by her father. Later, she would use her first literary prize money to purchase a state-of-the-art radio console, infuse her fiction with popular songs, and collaborate with woman-owned Caedmon Records to bring modernist literature into the world of recorded sound. These engagements with mass media formed a foundational part of Welty’s creative life, yet they have been largely understudied—until now.

Eudora Welty and Modern Media brings together eleven original essays that explore Welty’s wide-ranging engagement with twentieth-century technologies and forms of communication, including photography, radio, the recording industry, contemporary visual arts, film, advertising, magazine and fashion culture, journalism, and television. Edited by Harriet Pollack, the collection reframes Welty as a modernist innovator—akin to William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, or James Joyce—but who, as a Mississippi woman welcoming change, embraced the new rather than retreated from it. As Eliot reimagined poetry and Joyce redefined the novel, Welty transformed the American short story in tandem with the shifting media landscape of her time.