Welty on what’s ‘greater than scene’
A version of this post first appeared on August 31, 2008. Eudora Welty’s essay “The Little Store” takes us with her, as a child, to a neighborhood grocery, what we’d call a convenience store today. It’s a story about the lost world of childhood and it captures turn-of-the-century Jackson, Mississippi. All she conveys is suffused with meaning for her, but Welty avoids sentimentality by showing instead of telling readers what to feel. The store’s realm is one of children on …