To Absent Friends: Eudora Welty's Correspondence with Frank Lyell

With over 350 complete or excerpted letters, most previously unpublished, To Absent Friends: Eudora Welty's Correspondence with Frank Lyell forms an epistolary narrative of Welty’s writing life and her nearly fifty-year friendship with Frank Lyell, a friend from Jackson, Mississippi. Also included in the text are extensive annotations to explain the letters’ myriad, often telegraphic cultural references. Early letters show both correspondents’ youthful exuberance as Lyell pursued graduate s...