As with all of the stories that Welty composed before the beginning of her thirty-year association with Diarmuid Russell, little, if anything, is known about the circumstances of the composition of the story. However, by the time she submitted "Why I Live at the P.O." for publication, she had published some ten or eleven stories in small literary magazines, including the Southern Review,

and had begun to establish a network of literary relationships with such influential people as Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Ford Madox Ford, and Katherine Anne Porter. Welty was beginning to make her way onto the national literary scene, and, despite early rejections, continued to write for the joy of writing.

The most direct source for "Why I Live at the P.O." was mentioned by Welty in an interview with two of her own students, Royals and Little, in 1978; the comment has...