The Robber Bridegroom was published by Doubleday, Doran in November 1942 and is Welty’s first novella — a work unlike anything else in American fiction: a fairy tale set on the Natchez Trace in the late eighteenth century, combining the Grimm Brothers’ plot structure with frontier tall tales, Choctaw legend, and a comic sensibility that belongs to Welty alone. It is a fantasy that is also historical fiction, a children’s story that is also about adult violence and sexuality, a comedy that is also a meditation on the doubleness of American identity.
The Novella
Clement Musgrove, a planter, encounters Jamie Lockhart, a bandit who robs travelers on the Natchez Trace but is also (in daylight) a successful New Orleans merchant. Clement’s daughter Rosamond is beautiful; his second wife Salome is wicked (she wants Rosamond dead). Jamie, disguised by berry-juice stain on his face, kidnaps Rosamond; she falls in love with him without recognizing her father’s dinner guest. The resolution requires the removal of disguises — literal and metaphorical — and the acceptance that the hero and the bandit are the same man.
Welty draws directly on the Grimm tales (“The Robber Bridegroom,” “Snow White”) but transplants them to the Mississippi frontier, where the fairy-tale archetypes take on American coloring: the bandit becomes a frontier outlaw in the tradition of Mike Fink and Davy Crockett; the enchanted forest becomes the dangerous Natchez Trace; the wicked stepmother becomes a frontier woman of monstrous appetites.
Themes
The novella’s deepest argument is about doubleness — the inseparability of civilization and violence in American experience. Jamie Lockhart is both gentleman and robber; the Natchez Trace is both highway of commerce and wilderness of murder; America itself is both Edenic garden and scene of dispossession. Welty refuses to resolve these contradictions — they ARE the story.
Collecting The Robber Bridegroom
First edition (Doubleday, Doran, New York, 1942): Green cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket with stylized frontier illustration.
Identification points:
- Doubleday, Doran imprint
- “First Edition” stated
- 185 pages
- Wartime publication (paper quality reflects rationing)
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $800–$2,000. Small wartime printing and fragile paper make fine copies scarce.
Signed copies: $2,000–$4,000. Welty signed throughout her long life but early signed copies are particularly valued.
The novella was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1975 (book and lyrics by Alfred Uhry, music by Robert Waldman) — a connection that occasionally brings theatre collectors into the market.