The Ponder Heart
Edna Earle Ponder runs the Beulah Hotel in Clay, Mississippi, and corners a stranded guest for the length of the book to explain her Uncle Daniel, a sweet-natured man of middle age whose one failing is that he gives away everything he owns, the hotel included. Her account works round to his second marriage, to a seventeen-year-old shopgirl named Bonnie Dee Peacock, and from there to a courtroom the whole county turns out for, where Uncle Daniel is not to be kept from addressing the room. It took the William Dean Howells Medal and reached Broadway two years later, and it is the purest instance of the talking voice Eudora Welty built her comedy on.
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- 53% · 12 shared