It was a purposeful, measured journey she was making-you wouldn’t go on an errand like that-unless it were for someone else, you know. I knew she was bent on an errand, even at that distance. The inspiration for Phoenix Jackson was an ancient black woman whom Welty saw walking across the countryside as Welty was sitting under a tree near the Natchez Trace with a painter friend.”I watched her cross that landscape in the half-distance,” she explains,”and when I got home I wrote that story that she had made me think of.” In another interview, she added that “I knew she was going somewhere.
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Welty has discussed the genesis of “A Worn Path” in numerous interviews. Her stories deal with race relations on a personal level. However, politics very rarely enters her work directly. She grew up in an era where the Civil War and Reconstruction were still remembered by many of her neighbors, and she herself has lived through the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the Southern renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s. Born there in 1909 (to Northern parents), she grew up and has spent most of her life in Jackson. Welty comes from Mississippi, in many ways the most notoriously troubled of Southern states. However, it is with race that any discussion of Welly’s story must begin. Questions of age, service, dedication, and myth also inform the story. But race is certainly not the story’s only concern. Twentieth-century critics have chosen, for the most part, to examine the role race plays in the story and through that to either condemn Welty or exalt her for her views.
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Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” written in 1940, is one of the author’s most frequently anthologized stories, but this by no means indicates that it is her easiest.