Before becoming famous as a writer, Welty was a photographer. She worked as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), an employment program established by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Welty traveled to photograph her fellow Mississippians carrying out their daily routines. She felt her experience photographing these people influenced her writing. In her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty explained how photography informed her writing:

Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there’s so much more of life that only words can convey—strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer’s direction from the start, not a photographer’s, or a recorder’s (928).

Welty acknowledged that, before this WPA work, she led a sheltered life in her middle-class Jackson, Mississippi home. Taking these photographs allowed her a firsthand look at the poverty and poor living conditions of the people of her region.