Death of a Traveling Salesman

A child of the South, Welty layered her stories with details about place and brought the South alive; “Death of a Traveling Salesman” exudes this keen sense of setting and features other elements drawn from the author’s personal experiences. She was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909 and, as a young woman, earned degrees from the University of Wisconsin and a business degree from Columbia University. She worked in advertising and radio for a bit, then for the Works Progress Administration, a major economic stimulus initiative under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While her experience in business and advertising gave her a view into the commercialism embodied by her protagonist Bowman, her career also involved much traveling, during which she took unsentimental photographs of rural Southern life—life in a “desolate hill country” (109), as Bowman describes it. One photograph, titled Home Before Dark: Yalobusha County, 1936, depicts a mule-drawn wagon on a road recalling the dusty “cow trail” on which Bowman loses his way. It was during her travels that Welty started to write fiction, and “Death of a Traveling Salesman” was her first published story in 1936 in Manuscript magazine.