“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” was originally published in the July 6, 1963, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected and is currently most readily available in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Harcourt Brace).

A real event—the murder of civil-rights activist Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, in his own driveway—sparked Eudora Welty's monologue story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” She wrote the story at white heat at one sitting the night Evers was shot down in Jackson, Mississippi, where they both lived. By 1999 other real events were bringing a new generation of readers to the story. The victim's surviving brother, Charles Evers, had published his autobiography; the widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, had become chairman of the NAACP board of directors and written her memoir; and Hollywood had issued a film, Ghosts of Mississippi, about why it took thirty years and three juries to convict the white murderer Welty had imagined on paper.

Little of Welty's work has such a sense of art imitating life or so direct a link with current events. In her 1965 article for The Atlantic Monthly, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” she warned against stock characters who might only represent ideas—even if these were good ideas. Yet at least one reader sees this story as a move from aesthetics to ethics. This story stands out as a rare comment on her times, and unlike most of Welty's other stories, which were written more deliberately, “Powerhouse” and this one each came out in their essential shape at one sitting. Welty was at work on Losing Battles in the summer of 1963 and has told several interviewers that “Voice” just pushed right through that novel. Comparison of her typed draft (then called “From the Unknown”) with the version The New Yorker got into galleys just two weeks after the killing shows Welty condensing the story while editor William Maxwell and The New Yorker lawyers worked to make it less actionable, since a suspect with similarities to her character had been arrested before the story ran on July 6.