The second episode of a wonderful interview by Dick Cavett with one of America's greatest writers, Eudora Welty. Originally broadcast May 20, 1979 when Miss Welty had just turned 70.
I was already impressed by Welty's writing, but her righteous anger at Medgar Ever's assassination sealed the deal for me. "Where is the Voice Coming From?" is a perfect title, and that she wrote it in one sitting exemplifies what her moral priorities were.
What a gift for us! Thank you so much for posting it! Welty always struck me as mysterious somehow but I never saw or heard her interviewed before this. I first read her work in a collection called 13 Stories, in a small summer American Literature class at UCLA extension while I was in High School. Her story “A Worn Path” (as well as “Powerhouse” which she read from in this clip) bowled me over. “A Worn Path” is so powerful that years later when I taught a college English class in Hamilton, Ohio on the supernatural in fiction, I included it in the syllabus and my students loved it. Many of them chose to write about it for the essay question in their take-home exams. And that was decades after this program was broadcast. Bravo, Mr. Cavett, and Brava, Miss Welty!
This was such a great interview! I've listened to Part 1 before, and was listening again today when I realized that it was a two-parter! I've read THE WIDE NET and "Where is the Voice Coming From". I love the immediacy of Miss Eudora's reaction to Cavett's question on the Medgar Evers assassination. "When Medgar Evers was shot, not too long after that you wrote a piece in The New Yorker, a fiction piece. Was that written out of anger?" Her immediate reply "Yeah." 👏
When talking about the art of parody at 7:58, I think she says, '...such as Perelman or--' -- a reference to humorist S.J. Perelman. (The closed captioning unhelpfully renders it as 'paramount.')
