Introduction

This project began as a conference paper for the 2025 Eudora Welty International Conference in Jackson, Mississippi. That paper, “A Piece of News: Finding Eudora Welty in the Newspaper,” drew a line between Welty’s short story, “A Piece of News,” and Welty herself as a piece of news, guided by two questions: How was Eudora Welty presented to and known by readers in her time? And: When Eudora Welty found her name in the newspaper, what version of herself did she see, “what eye in the world did she feel looking in on her?”

Since that time I have been documenting every instance of Eudora Welty’s name in the newspaper, and with the help of Michael Pickard and the Digital Welty Lab at Millsaps College, my work has been developed into a digital humanities project, “A Piece of News:Finding Eudora Welty in the Newspaper.”

As more articles are added to this index, the more possible it is to see a fuller, rounder, version of Welty’s life, both biographically and influentially. So that while this project continues to be driven by those two original questions, it also considers more nuanced questions, such as: How did everyday readers find Welty’s work? How was the Eudora Welty as represented in the newspapers different from the Eudora Welty we come to know via One Writer’s Beginnings? Beyond her writing, what role did Welty play in the history of Jackson and of Mississippi? How did Welty move from society column writer to a figure in popular culture? What other authors share a similar lifespan in the newspaper, both in breadth and depth? How does Welty’s lifespan in the newspaper continue to draw readers to her work? How are historical newspapers as material culture important to Welty studies?

While we plan to explore many of these, and other questions, as this project continues, and in a future book, there are so many other questions that can be considered using this collection, and so many surprises to be found. We hope scholars will find the collection useful for their own research. We also hope scholars will be interested in adding articles to the project from sources and areas of the world that we currently don’t have access to.

Using this Collection

We suggest starting with the Map page, to get a sense of where the articles appear, and the Timeline page to see articles by date. Beyond that we suggest using the Subjects page, where clicking on any of the Subjects provides a list of associated articles. For example, choosing the Shoe Bird offers not only a list of book reviews of The Shoe Bird, but advertisements, library listings, and symphony and ballet news and reviews, and, with them, a fuller understanding of the history and representation of The Shoe Bird. The Visualizations page further explores The Shoe Bird, and offers an example of how we intend to show and consider data as the project grows.

Mostly, we hope, like Ruby Fisher, you enjoy the “rustle of surprise” that comes with finding Eudora Welty in the newspaper.