Inside Eudora Welty's Jackson House, Frozen Mid-Sentence

The Eudora Welty House in Jackson, Mississippi, is staged to look exactly as it did in 1986, and nothing has moved. Books stay stacked on couches, scattered across beds, open in the breakfast nook, as if she had just gotten up. The house gives you the strange pleasure of intruding on a writer who has merely stepped out.

The excerpt comes from These Long Shadows: Women's House Museums in the American South by Monica Nelson, published by Atelier Éditions. Author Monica Nelson toured the property on a five-day road trip through Mississippi that also took in the Medgar Evers house — Evers's home, now a historic site at 2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive.

What survives at 1119 Pinehurst Street?

The Tudor Revival house, built in 1925 by architect Wyatt C. Hedrick, was Welty's home for all but 16 of her years. It was landmarked in 2002 and opened to the public in 2006. Its primary function now is literary tourism. Everything remains intact: paintings, rugs, furniture, drapes and, above all, the books. The house is considered one of the most substantive writers' homes in the country — the most authentic representation of a working writer.

Welty lived her whole life in Jackson except for 12 years at school in Wisconsin and New York City. She returned in 1931 after failing to make money in New York, moved back into her teenage home and wrote in the bedroom upstairs, at a desk in front of three windows overlooking the front lawn. Neighbors reportedly looked in to see if she was there. She almost always was.

A library as a way of life

In One Writer's Beginnings, Welty wrote that the house's function was always that "any room, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read to." Her parents prized books as their most important collection — a home library that let them explore beyond Mississippi.

On a visit, Jessica Russell, director of the Eudora Welty Foundation, pointed through the dining room's picture window toward white camellias, past a table covered in books topped by a biography of Yeats and a book on Monticello. Welty started the Night-blooming Cereus Club, motto: "Don't take it cereus. Life's too mysterious." The club met whenever the flower bloomed — once a summer, after dusk, gone by morning. She described the plant as looking like "a wrung chicken's neck."

What did the camera teach the novelist?

Before publishing her first story, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration (the New Deal agency that employed artists and documented Depression-era America). She spent the early 1930s photographing her state's poverty, images that later inspired stories, including "Why I Live at the P.O." "I see things in pictures," she said. "The only talent I have for writing is quite visual... A snapshot is a moment's glimpse, a story is a longer look, a growing contemplation."

She rejected the social-documentary label. "Poverty in Mississippi, white and black, really didn't have too much to do with the Depression," she wrote. "It was ongoing. Mississippi was long since poor, long devastated. I took the pictures of our poverty because that was reality, and I was recording it."

The honors, the friendships, the verdict

Welty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. Her 1963 New Yorker story "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" took the perspective of a White male Southerner and addressed a crime like the murder of Medgar Evers. Novelist Maureen Howard wrote: "She is a Southerner as Chekhov was a Russian, because place provides them with a reality — a reality as difficult, mysterious and impermanent as life." Her novella The Ponder Heart reached Broadway in 1956.

Asked by Alice Walker whether she regretted not marrying or having children, Welty said she did: "Oh, I would have been glad if it had come along... I think the more things, the better." Poet Margaret Walker, her friend and neighbor on the street where Evers was killed, said Welty "values the human spirit above everything else." The house on Pinehurst Street keeps the longer look open.