Situation Wanted

Every time I see {another} headline about the plight of the unemployed, I want to stop reading anything but old novels.  But reading Eudora Welty's letter applying for a job at The New Yorker made me smile, and even feel ready again to go back into the fray.

{to the editors of The New Yorker, March 15, 1933}

Gentlemen:

I suppose you'd be more interested in even a sleight o'hand trick than you'd be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can't have the thing you want most.

I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930-1931, while attending advertising classes in Columbia's School of Business. Actually, I am a Southerner, from Mississippi, the nation's most backward state. ... I have a B.A. ('29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up.

As to what I might do you for you -- I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15 [cent] movies lately, and could review them with my old preposterous detachment. ... That shows you how my mind works -- quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

Since I have bought an India print, and a large number of phonograph records from a Mr. Nussbaum who picks them up ... I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you!  A little paragraph each morning -- a little paragraph each night, if you can't hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting.

There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase you, but consider my other alternative:  the U. of N.C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay's Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker. Truly yours, Eudora Welty.

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

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