30 pages • 1 hour read
Eudora WeltyDeath of a Traveling Salesman
Fiction | Short Story | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Eudora Welty
A child of the South, Welty layered her stories with details about place and brought the South alive; “Death of a Traveling Salesman” exudes this keen sense of setting and features other elements drawn from the author’s personal experiences. She was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909 and, as a young woman, earned degrees from the University of Wisconsin and a business degree from Columbia University. She worked in advertising and radio for a bit, then for the Works Progress Administration, a major economic stimulus initiative under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While her experience in business and advertising gave her a view into the commercialism embodied by her protagonist Bowman, her career also involved much traveling, during which she took unsentimental photographs of rural Southern life—life in a “desolate hill country” (109), as Bowman describes it. One photograph, titled Home Before Dark: Yalobusha County, 1936, depicts a mule-drawn wagon on a road recalling the dusty “cow trail” on which Bowman loses his way. It was during her travels that Welty started to write fiction, and “Death of a Traveling Salesman” was her first published story in 1936 in Manuscript magazine. As her stories were published more frequently in the 1930s and early 1940s, she committed to writing as her craft.
Historical Context: The Second Industrial Revolution and Modernism
No less than her stories’ Southern settings, Welty’s themes are informed by her life experience, as she was born during the Second Industrial Revolution and witnessed a radical societal shift. As the West moved from relatively small-scale industrialism to near global-scale finance capitalism, the United States and Western Europe saw a massive increase in consumable wealth—and an unprecedented cultural pursuit of profit. Bowman’s fixation on his job, as well as his personality’s rigidification as a salesman, reflect this pursuit to the extreme. For him, the pursuit of profit eclipses all else, even material possession. The story rarely indicates Bowman’s interest in physical luxury; rather, his passion is for gain itself, largely dissociated from any corporeal good that such gain could purchase or bring into existence. Nevertheless, the story evinces that Bowman has a deeper, nascent desire when he finds himself envious about his hosts’ unborn child, who symbolizes both generative relationship and new beginnings. Welty’s Southern contemporary Flannery O’Connor might have described Bowman as “grotesque,” meaning that he is spiritually incomplete (and therefore spiritually misshapen) yet retains a core impulse toward wholeness, keeping him within the grasp of redemption. Because the ethos of the Second Industrial Revolution increasingly typified the Northern states while the South preserved a more agrarian culture, Modern Southern literature abounds with such “grotesque” characters who represent the potentially dehumanizing effects of an encroaching Northern industrialism.
The Second Industrial Revolution, in turn, corresponds with the Modernist movement. Inspired partly by a world undergoing rapid change through urbanization and industrialization, Modernist literature often conveys a sense of alienation and disorientation, qualities attending Bowman’s fateful odyssey. Like “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” Welty’s other work explores the inner lives of her protagonists, who are often “perpetually passing through, belonging nowhere,” and seeking a different way of life (Johnson, Sarah. “Welty, Eudora, 1909-.” ProQuest Biographies, 2010).
Literary Context: Race in Southern Renaissance Literature
Welty began publishing her writing in the mid-1930s, at the tail end of the Southern Renaissance movement and amidst Modernism. In the 1920s and 1930s, writers such as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Penn Warren wrote literature in Southern settings about Southern culture but resisted the literary tradition that came before them, known as the “Lost Cause” mythology, in which Southern writers romanticized the Antebellum South and lamented the loss of the Civil War in 1865. The new movement was characterized by “more personal and modernized viewpoints including opposition to industrialization and the South’s abiding racism” (Boundless. “The Southern Renaissance”). In the Modernist fashion, the stories explore protagonists’ inner worlds, experiment with form and style, and are rich with symbolism.
Welty grew into her craft studying the writers of the Southern Renaissance as well as notable Modernists Virginia Woolf and William Butler Yeats (Burt, John. “Eudora Welty [1909-].” The Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story, 2001). Her work consistently uses symbolism and explores a single character’s experience. Welty also often wrote stories, such as “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” with themes critiquing industrialization, as the forebears of the Southern Renaissance did. Rarely, however, did her work center on issues of race in the South, for which she (like other Modern Southern writers) was criticized and which she discussed in essays and interviews. “Death of a Traveling Salesman” does not address how the practice of slavery informs the work’s themes of personal agency, work, community, and family in the American South. Welty defends this choice in a 1965 essay titled, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” in which she argues that writing with a message of political reform can make for poor storytelling: “Are fiction writers on call to be crusaders? For us in the South who are fiction writers, is writing a novel something we can do about it?” The “it” here is racism in the Jim Crow South. However, she also published “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (1963) and “The Demonstrators” (1966), which tackle subject matter related to slavery, race, and the civil rights movement (Flower, Dean. “Eudora Welty and Racism.” The Hudson Review, vol. 60, no. 2, 2007, pp. 325-32).
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