Eudora Welty (1909–2001), like many famous authors, was not an overnight sensation. When she first sent her stories around, editors and publishers did not understand her work. Then her agent, Diarmuid Russell, connected her with William Maxwell at The New Yorker. Russell and Maxwell perceived Welty’s genius and championed her, and the rest is recorded in Welty’s letters with Russell, collected in Author and Agent, and in Welty’s Harvard lectures, One Writer’s Beginnings, written when she was nearing eighty. Her marvelous short novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. Welty also received the National Medal of Honor and the French Legion of Honor. She is among the greatest short story writers of all time.

Photograph by Ulf Andersen.

No Place for You, My Love

A Story

by Eudora Welty

They were strangers to each other, both fairly well strangers to the place, now seated side by side at luncheon—a party combined in a free-and-easy way when the friends he and she were with recognized each other across Galatoire’s. The time was a Sunday in summer—those hours of afternoon that seem Time Out in New Orleans.

The moment he saw her little blunt, fair face, he thought that here was a woman who was having an affair. It was one of those odd meetings when such an impact is felt that it has to be translated at once into some sort of speculation.

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