Eudora Welty

By the Wind Grieved

By Jonathan Yardley

Fall 2012

In the spring of 1976, William Maxwell left his job as fiction editor of the New Yorker, where he had worked for four decades, in order to concentrate on his own writing. This came as unhappy news to any number of writers, for he had nursed along many of the best, giving them sympathy, patience, understanding, and a light but firm editorial hand. None was more distressed than Eudora Welty, with whom he had worked for nearly a quarter-century and who was especially dependent on his counsel, not to mention on a friendship that had long since deepened into platonic love.

0 Comments

A Kind of Solution

By Christopher Merrill

Fall 2004

The writer was drinking himself to death. In his first flush of freedom—he had come to Iowa from a land ruled by a military dictatorship—he drowned himself in vodka, and when for the third day running he was rushed to the emergency room with a blood alcohol level that would have killed another man, he was committed for observation. The date was September 10, 2001. That evening, more than eight hours after his last drink, the writer was still dead drunk. The judge who signed his commitment order called the next day, incredulous.

0 Comments