A Worn Path Study Guide

Eudora Welty grew up in a close-knit family and received her undergraduate education at Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus and the University of Wisconsin. She also did graduate work at Columbia University School of Business. She published her first story, “Death of a Traveling Salesmen” in 1936, to much acclaim. A writer of both short stories and novels focused predominantly on the American South, she was particularly famous for her short stories, though she also won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter in 1973. In her later years she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor. She died of cardio-pulmonary failure after a short illness at the age of 92.

Though “A Worn Path” was written in 1941 and seems to take place at that time period, Phoenix Jackson was born in the antebellum South, a period before the Civil War when slavery was legal in the United States. The end of the Civil War in 1865 and the adoption of the 13th Amendment in the same year marked the end of slavery. The following years until, until 1877, are classified as the Reconstruction era, during which the federal government transition Southern states back into the Union. The story, however, takes place in 1941, when Jim Crow laws were fully in effect in the Deep South. These were state and local laws that were put into effect after Reconstruction that allowed unequal and segregated treatment of blacks and that great disadvantaged black people in every sector of society.

“A Worn Path” bears some commonalities with works of fiction by writers including William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor, who deal with the questions and consequences of racial tension in the United Sates South, often through characters, like Phoenix Jackson, who are unusual or are outsiders in their communities.