Why I Live at the P.O. | "Why Sister Lives at the P.O.,’’ in The Critical Response to Eudora Welty’s Fiction
In the following essay, May advocates a close, analytical reading of "Why I Live at the P.O." to extract a more insightful understanding of the complex comical and psychological dynamics that are involved in the story’s composition.
Often in literary studies a well-known artist will turn critic briefly and make an offhand comment about the work of a fellow writer that becomes solidified into dogma and thus creates a critical or interpretative dead end. Such seems to be the case with the one-liner that Katherine Anne Porter tossed off over thirty years ago about Eudora Welty’s popular little family comedy, ‘‘Why I Live at the P.O.’’ Porter’s classifying of the story as a ‘‘terrifying case of dementia praecox’’ seems so ‘‘right’’ that no one has ever bothered to examine or challenge her...
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