The debut short fiction collection from the Pulitzer Prizewinning Southern author: ';A fine writer and a distinguished book' (The New Yorker). When A Curtain of Green was published, it immediately established an unknown young writer from Mississippi as a uniquely original literary voice and a great American author. In her now-famous introduction to the collection, Katherine Anne Porter wrote that ';there is even in the smallest story a sense of power in reserve which makes me believe firmly that, splendid beginning that it is, it is only a beginning.' In this collection are many of the stories that have become acknowledged masterpieces: the hilarious over-the-top family drama that drives a small-town resentful postmistress to explain ';Why I Live at the P.O.'; the deeply satisfying thwarting of a trio of busybodies by a ';feeble-minded' young woman in ';Lily Daw and the Three Ladies'; the poignant pilgrimage of elderly Phoenix Jackson in ';A Worn Path'; and the boldly experimental and jubilantly playful literary improvisation of ';Powerhouse,' inspired by a performance Eudora Welty saw by Fats Waller. Porter added that ';[Welty] has simply an eye and an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork.' Like the jazz tunes Powerhouse bangs out on the piano, Welty's stories remain as fresh, alive, and unpredictable today as when they first appeared. ';Miss Welty's stories are deceptively simple. They are concerned with ordinary people, but what happens to them and the manner of the telling are far from ordinary.'The New Yorker
