In the 1960s, Mississippi writer Eudora Welty famously declined to write fiction that crusaded against segregation, even when pressured with middle-of-the-night phone calls and “harangues.” Welty was prompted to address the challenge in more detail in the October 1965 Atlantic Monthly, where she answered the title of her essay, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” negatively. Using E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India as an example, Welty wrote, “What a lesser novelist’s harangues [about “race prejudice”] would have buried by now, his imagination still reveals.”1 Years later, she told interviewer Jean Todd Freeman, “I felt like saying I didn’t need their pointers to know that there was injustice among human beings or that there was trouble. I had been writing about that steadily right along by letting my characters show this.”2
Sadly, instead of heeding Welty’s advice, our literati
Get access to this article, plus the entire archive, by subscribing.