Five hours of color video footage featuring fiction writer Eudora Welty was recently discovered in the media archives of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The film, which was originally shot for the 1975 NEA documentary The Writer in America, will be donated to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for display at Welty’s home in the Bellhaven district of Jackson. The NEA will also award the state agency a $10,000 grant for video preservation.
Welty, who died in 2001 at the age of 92, began her career in the 1930s as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration in rural Mississippi. Her novels and collections of short stories include The Ponder Heart (Harcourt, Brace, 1954), The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (Harcourt, Brace, 1955), and The Optimist’s Daughter (Random House, 1972), which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
