The debut short fiction collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning Southern author: “A fine writer and a distinguished book” (The New Yorker). When A Curtain of Green was published, it immediately established an unknown young writer from Mississippi as a uniquely original literary voice and a great American author. In her now-famous introduction to the collection, Katherine Anne Porter wrote that “there is even in the smallest story a sense of power in reserve which makes me believe firmly that, splendid beginning that it is, it is only a beginning.” In this collection are many of the stories that have become acknowledged masterpieces: the hilarious over-the-top family drama that drives a small-town resentful postmistress to explain “Why I Live at the P.O.”; the deeply satisfying thwarting of a trio of busybodies by a “feeble-minded” young woman in “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies”; the poignant pilgrimage of elderly Phoenix Jackson in “A Worn Path”; and the boldly experimental and jubilantly playful literary improvisation of “Powerhouse,” inspired by a performance Eudora Welty saw by Fats Waller. Porter added that “[Welty] has simply an eye and an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork.” Like the jazz tunes Powerhouse bangs out on the piano, Welty’s stories remain as fresh, alive, and unpredictable today as when they first appeared. “Miss Welty’s stories are deceptively simple. They are concerned with ordinary people, but what happens to them and the manner of the telling are far from ordinary.”—The New Yorker

"Lily Daw is young, pretty, perhaps more than a little peculiar, and in love! However, the well-meaning ladies of the Helping Hand Society are determined to see Lily off to the State Home for the Feeble-Minded. They just don't believe her when she says she's planning to be married this very day. The ladies certainly do have grounds for concern. Lily has always had an odd imagination, and the man she's describing now is a 'show fellow.' One thing is clear to the ladies, the faster they can get Lily committed, the better. They urgently try to get her consent. As they're winning her over, a 'show fellow' appears and actually wants to marry Lily."--Publisher's website

A collection of stories which capture the joys and sorrows of life in the deep South.

Stories as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. These stories are honest, and vastly entertaining.

In her 91st year, this book includes 90 of Welty's photos along with a conversation in which she shares her impressions and memories of the 1930s and 1940s when she rambled through Mississippi cemeteries taking pictures.