In the following essay, May advocates a close, analytical reading of Why I Live at the P.O. to extract a more insightful understanding of the complex comical and psychological dynamics that are involved in the story's composition.

Often in literary studies a well-known artist will turn critic briefly and make an offhand comment about the work of a fellow writer that becomes solidified into dogma and thus creates a critical or interpretative dead end. Such seems to be the case with the one-liner that Katherine Anne Porter tossed off over thirty years ago about Eudora Welty's popular little family comedy, "Why I Live at the P.O." Porter's classifying of the story as a "terrifying case of dementia praecox" seems so "right" that no one has ever bothered to examine or challenge her judgment. If the story is a case study, albeit an hilarious one, of...