A Curtain of Green

Stories in the collection

• "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" (Prairie Schooner, Winter 1937)
• "A Piece of News" (The Southern Review, Summer 1937)
• "Petrified Man" (The Southern Review, Summer 1937)
• "The Key" (Harper's Bazaar, August 1941)
• "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden" (New Directions in Prose & Poetry, 1940)
• "Why I Live at the P.O." (The Atlantic, April 1941)
• "The Whistle" (Prairie Schooner, Fall 1938)
• "The Hitch-Hikers" (The Southern Review, Fall 1939)
• "A Memory" (The Southern Review, Fall 1937)
• "Clytie" (The Southern Review, Summer 1941)
• "Old Mr. Marblehall" (The Southern Review, Spring 1938; a.k.a "Old Mr. Grenada")
• "Flowers for Marjorie" (Prairie Schooner, Summer 1937)
• "A Curtain of Green" (The Southern Review, Fall 1938)
• "A Visit of Charity" (Decision, A Review of Free Culture, June 1941)
• "Death of a Traveling Salesman" (Manuscript magazine, May 1936)
• "Powerhouse" (The Atlantic, June 1941)
• "A Worn Path" (The Atlantic, February 1941)

Background

During her highly production years 1937 and 1938, Welty was writing fiction as yet “destined to be classics of the short-story genre.” Encouraged by Ford Madox Ford and Katherine Anne Porter, among others, Welty felt assured that she could successfully pursue a literary career. John Woodburn, seeking talent for Doubleday, visited Welty at her Mississippi home during a tour of the South. In May 1940, Doubleday requested Diarmuid Russell, a literary agent, to offer his services to Welty; she accepted. Rather than insist she produce a novel, as G. P. Putnam's Sons and Harcourt Brace had indicated, Russell invited her to New York to write material for a short story collection. Welty continued to produce stories during that year—among these” A Worn Path” and “Why I Live at the P.O.—but Russell found it difficult to place much of her material in major periodicals, a crucial precursor to book publication. By early 1941, Russell had commitments for journal publication of all works that would appear in A Curtain of Green.

John Woodburn at Doubleday accepted terms for publication on January 21, 1941, after which Welty “fine-tuned” the fiction for upcoming publication in a number of periodicals (See Stories section below for periodicals). A Curtain of Green appeared later in 1941 with an Introduction by Katherine Anne Porter.

Reception

A reviewer for Time magazine, November 24, 1941, declared that Welty “[h]as a strong taste for melodrama, and is preoccupied with the demented, the deformed, the queer, the highly spiced. Of the 17 pieces, only two report states of experience which could be called normal.”

Marianne Hauser, reviewing the book for The New York Times on November 18, 1941, praises "the author's fanatic love of people. With a few lines she draws the gesture of a deaf-mute, the windblown skirts of a Negro woman in the fields, the bewilderment of a child in the sickroom of an old people's asylum--and she has told more than many an author might tell in a novel of six hundred pages".

Katherine Anne Porter, who wrote the book's Introduction, observed:

Literary critic and poet Carol Ann Johnston, writing in 1997, reminds readers that “stereotyping” among Welty’s contemporary critics was widespread: “All in all, these critics viewed Welty’s work as symptomatic of southern provinciality and a terminal attachment ot the gothic.

Footnotes

Sources

• Johnston, Carol Ann. 1997. Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, New York. Gordon Weaver, general editor.
• Marrs, Suzanne. 2005. Eudora Welty: A Biography. Harvest Books, Orlando, Florida. (paperback)
• Olney, James. 1998. Where the Voice Came From. New York Times. November 22, 1998. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/reviews/981122.22olneyt.html Accessed 22 September 2025.
• Pierpont, Claudia Roth. 1998. A Perfect Lady. The New Yorker, October 5, 1998.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/05/a-perfect-lady Accessed 22 September 2025.
• Welty, Eudora. 1955. A Curtain of Green. Doubleday, New York.
• Welty, Eudora. 2001. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Barnes & Noble Modern Classics. {{ISBN | 0-7607-2409-1}}

References

1. Johnston, 1997 p. 238: Selected Bibliography.
2. Johnston, 1997 p. 41
3. Marrs, 2005 p. 61-62
4. Marrs, 2005 p. 62-63
5. Marrs, 2005 p. 64-65
6. Marrs, 2005 p. 70
7. Marrs, 2005 p. 69
8. Johnston, 1997 p. 8: See Notes on Part 1, no. 14, p. 106
9. "A Curtain of Green". The New York Times.
10. Welty, Eudora. ''A Curtain of Green and Other Stories'' with an Introduction by Katherine Anne Porter. NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1979, p. xix-xx.
11. Olney, 1998: “A Curtain of Green [is] a collection of 17 stories that seem individually like so many experiments in voice, perspective, texture…The volume's tonal variety is astonishing.”
12. Pierpont, 1998: “The book contained six years of varied, jolting, intense storytelling, by an author who now gave no sign of having ever willingly stepped off her front porch.”
13. Johnston, 1997 p. 8: See here for review excerpts from [[Diana Trilling]]