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Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909. She attended Mississippi State College for Women before transferring to the University of Wisconsin followed by a year of business school at Columbia University. After her return home from school, she held various jobs including one at a news radio station a job in the WPA where she acted as a junior publicity agent for the state. In this position she traveled throughout the state promoting infrastructure cahnges as well as taking photographs. Photography has always been important to Welty, and her first published story "Death of a Traveling Salesman" (1936) uses photographic ideas to strucutre the story with its framed scenes. Eudora Welty has focused on the short story with her first book of stories published in 1941, A Curtain of Green, but she has also written novel such as The Robber Bridegroom (1946), as well as essays and non-fiction in A Writer's Eye: Collected Book Reviews (1994). Eudora Welty is the only living writer to be published in The Library of America collection. "Powerhouse" is the story of an African-American man named Powerhouse and his band during on night in the 1930s. The text is securly placed in the present day of its writing through references to the songs of the time. The songs not only place it, but they also comment on racial issues of the time--the men want to hear different songs from the ones they are requested to play by their white audience. The music also becomes an important part of the story itself with the words taking on musicality. The reader can notice the repeated chorus in the "I got a telegram" as well as direct comparisons between music references and the verbal conversation such as "triplets" after the repetition "tell, me, tell me, tell me," that sounds just like the musicl figure. Welty catches a night in the lives of these men, showing us the night, Mississippi, the Depression, as well as letting the reader hear their music with a little of her own. |
