The best job inquiry letter ever: Eudora Welty to the New Yorker

Eighty years ago Friday, young Eudora Welty sent a letter to the New Yorker seeking employment. This was four decades before she would win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “The Optimist’s Daughter� and five decades before “The Collected Works of Eudora Welty� won a National Book Award -- but she showed tremendous promise, writerly skill and lighthearted charm.

Here’s a portion:

“I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930-31 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 for you — I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. 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, and a Cezanne Bathers one inch long (that shows you I read e. e. cummings I hope), I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you!�

There’s more; the complete letter is up at Letters of Note, the brilliant British literary blog that unearths, well, letters of note. Moving, funny, fascinating: The letters he finds demonstrate just how much we’re losing by abandoning our epistolary past. A Letters of Note book is coming out later this year in England -- won’t someone make it happen in America, too?

As for Welty -- while her future was bright, it was not to be with the New Yorker. The magazine, unfathomably, did not hire her.

ALSO:

Dennis Hopper’s carnival ride through life

Satirical genius Sam Lipsyte flirts with disaster

Pope Francis to be subject of new book (already)

Carolyn Kellogg: Join me on Twitter, Facebook and Google+