When I visited novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty in the summer of 1994 for a newspaper interview, the first challenge was finding a place to sit. The Tudor Revival home where she’d grown up in Jackson, Mississippi, though spacious, was bursting with books.
Some of Welty’s personal library had colonized the couch. I squeezed in beside a stack on one of the cushions, where a copy of newsman Jim Lehrer’s memoir, “A Bus of My Own,” rested at the summit.
“Isn’t this terrible, this mess?” Welty, who was then 85, asked by way of apology.
But like most bookworms, she didn’t seem inclined to reform. We broke the ice by talking about summer reading plans. She mentioned keeping at least one detective mystery nearby — “you can read one a night”— and that she’d been rereading the fiction of Chekhov and Elizabeth Bowen…