Why I Live at the P.O. | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Why I Live at the P.O. Critical Overview

When it appeared in 1941, Welty's first book, A Curtain of Green, was met with mostly good reviews. However, reviewers who made up the northern literary establishment tended to find Welty's characters abnormal, a quality they chauvinistically associated with the South. "Like many Southern writers, she has a strong taste for melodrama and is preoccupied with the demented, the deformed, the queer, the highly spiced," reads a Time review. A mixed review in Books includes a similar comment: "As a whole, A Curtain of Green shows too great a preoccupation with the abnormal and grotesque. Some day some one might explore this tendency of Southern writers." However, the collection also won some very positive reviews. Interestingly, those critics who liked the book tended to focus on an opposite characteristic—Welty's beautiful and subtle portrayal of the normal. For example, the New York Times's Miriam Hauser states that "few contemporary books have...
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