January 2012. Michael Robinson celebrates—and shares—his late uncle’s friendship with Eudora Welty.

Michael Robinson and his partner Donald Boutté are passionate about art. Every room of their Baton Rouge home—including bathrooms, laundry room and garage—is filled with a vast collection of paintings. Other surfaces hold sculptures and ceramic works. Selections from their collection—mostly contemporary and mostly by Louisiana artists—were featured in an exhibit at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum last year.

But Robinson is equally enthusiastic about his family heirlooms, particularly literary ones. He grew up in a large family that seemed to know or be related to just about everyone. (His step-great-grandfather was James K. Vardaman, who served as governor of Mississippi and as a United States senator.) “He had a five-thousand-volume library,” says Robinson, who inherited some of the books.

Among his most cherished possessions are signed first editions by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Eudora Welty, a family friend.

Robinson’s paternal uncle John Fraiser Robinson (1909-1989) was a lifelong friend of Welty and a writer himself, who won a stay at the Yaddo colony and published short stories in magazines such as Harper’s and The New Yorker. His friendship with fellow Mississippi writer Welty (1909-2001) flourished over many years, cemented by the exchange of hundreds of letters.

Michael Robinson, whose father grew up in a house across the street from Millsaps College in Jackson, recalls that his family and Welty’s were always connected. “All of them were master bridge players,” he says. “When they were still teenagers, my aunts and uncles would play bridge with the adults. They were at each other’s houses all the time.”

Robinson recalls tagging along when an uncle took figs or strawberries to Welty, who would make preserves from them.

Add Comment