"why i live at the P.O.

In the short story “Why I Live at the P.O.”, author Eudora Welty creates a “grim comedy” in which what happens to the characters immediately seem to be funny but in the end cause them to have a destructive ending. Welty borrows from her own life experiences from being raised in the South to develop a story in which a comic character lives their own sad destructive life in the South. Welty “presents the distortions of life in the context of the ordinary… feminine nonsense-family life, relatives, conversations, eccentric old people- and a sharp, penetrating eye for the seams of this world, through which a murderous light shines.”(Oates 54-7)
Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909. Her parents were from the North; her father from Wisconsin and her mother from Virginia. As a child she was fond of reading and love writing. She had many pieces published in children’s magazines as a preteen. She went to Mississippi State College for women for two years...