The Golden Apples

Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work… show more.

Welty was never employed by the WPA as a creative writer, per se. She was a publicity agent, and a very young one. She was hired on to the project in her early twenties, not long after finishing college, and she spent her tenure traveling in the south, interviewing people, and taking photos. And the seven stories in The Golden Apples, to me, read like a natural outgrowth of that experience – attentive to place and mores, and full of imagery. Its characters have lips stained by blackberries and they smell of “orphan-starch;” their eyelashes look like “flopping black… show more.