As a delightful writer and avid reader of letters, Eudora Welty once explained that "All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth--or perhaps untruth, some flash of light--is just occurring. It is clamorous with the moment's happiness or pain. To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship. What we've been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago." Contemporary readers now have the ability to read Welty's mail, as three editions of her letters have recently been published:

What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, edited by Suzanne Marrs

Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, edited by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan

Tell About Night Flowers: Eudora Welty's Gardening Letters, 1940-1949, edited by Julia Eichelberger.

Also, Michael Kreyling details the friendship between Welty and her agent, Diarmuid Russell, by drawing from and including much of their correspondence in Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell.