Why I Live at the P.O.

Why I Live at the P.O., short story by Eudora Welty, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1941 and collected in A Curtain of Green (1941). This comic monologue by Sister, a young woman in a small Mississippi town who has set up housekeeping in the post office to escape from her eccentric family, is a prime example of Southern Gothic writing. As Sister’s story of betrayal and injustice unfolds, the reader gradually becomes...