Dates: 1956; 1965.
Size: 0. 25 cubic ft. 
Restrictions: Collection may be viewed: the photocopying restrictions for the Welty (Eudora) Collection (Z/0301.000/S) apply to items authored by Eudora Welty in this collection as well.

 

Biography:
Allie Mae (Lindsey) Smith-Stephens

Allie Mae Smith-Stephens was born in Teoc, Carroll County, Mississippi on May 5, 1917 to Thomas Jefferson Lindsey and Lottie (Lipe) Lindsey. She graduated from Mississippi State University for Women in 1939. Nearly fifty years later, she earned a Masters of Divinity in 1986 from Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. She married her first husband, Douglas I. Smith, in 1942 and they had three children. During World War II, while her husband was serving in the Armed Forces, she worked in New York City for Newsweek Magazine, and then for the Pentagon’s War Department near Washington, D.C. Douglas Smith, a farmer in Sidon, Mississippi, and a former County Supervisor, died in 1978. She married Hugh Woodrow Stephens in 1990.

Throughout most of her career, Smith-Stephens was a secondary teacher in a number of schools in the Mississippi Delta. She died in Greenwood, Mississippi on March 29, 2017 a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday.

 
Related collections at MDAH:

Series 34: Dramatizations of Welty’s Fiction, Eudora Welty Collection (Z/0301), MDAH.

 

Scope and Content Note:

This collection is arranged into two series: correspondence and published printed material. Welty’s letter to Smith reveals that Smith’s junior class at Leflore High School is to stage the play adaptation of The Ponder Heart; Welty sent her best wishes for the success of the production.

 

Series Identification:

Series 1: Correspondence. 1965.

This series consists of a notecard and envelope from Eudora Welty to Allie Mae Smith dated February 9, 1965. In the note, Welty extends her regrets that the two will not be able to meet when Smith expects to be in Jackson, and thanks Smith for her plans to produce The Ponder Heart at the high school where Smith teaches.

Box 1, folder 1

 

Series 2: Printed and Published Materials. 1956.

This series contains a copy of The Ponder Heart, A New Comedy In Three Acts by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, published by Samuel French, Inc. in 1956.

Box 1, folder 2