Between 1940 and 1949, Eudora Welty wrote hundreds of letters to two close friends who shared her passion for gardening: Diarmuid Russell, her agent, and John Robinson, a friend from high school and a romantic interest since the late 1930s. Russell and Robinson were also Welty’s first readers in the 1940s when she was creating some of her best-known works: A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, and The Golden Apples.

Tell about Night Flowers is a collection of letters from this period, most of them previously unpublished and only recently made available for study at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Taken together with 35 illustrations, the letters in this book form a poetic narrative of their own, chronicling artistic and psychic developments that were underway before Welty was fully conscious of them. By 1949 her art, like her friendships, had evolved in ways that she would never have predicted in 1940.

Published by the University Press of Mississippi

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New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
Contact: Clint Kimberling ckimberling@ihl.state.ms.us (UP of MS)  Julia Eichelberger eichelbergerj@cofc.edu (College of Charleston)