Eudora Welty American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Photographer, and Essayist April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001

Biographical Information Lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi. B.A. U of Wisconsin; attended N.Y. Columbia University School of Business. Father died in 1931 from leukemia. After The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), for fifteen years, no major work was published  Welty took care of her dying mother and family.

Eudora Welty’s home, built by her parents, Christian and Chestina Welty in Welty lived here most of her adult life.

General Notes Wrote short fiction stories, novels, essays and published some of her photography. Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist’s Daughter.  Most nearly autobiographical out of her work. Welty’s personal favorite  Collection of short stories, The Golden Apples, 1949.

Selected Works A Curtain of Green (1941) The Robber Bridegroom (1942) The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943) Delta Wedding (1946) The Golden Apples (1949) The Ponder Heart (1954) The Bride of Innisfallen (1955) Losing Battles (1970) One Time, One Place (1971) The Optimist’s Daughter (1972) The Eye of the Story (1978) The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980) One Writers Beginnings (1984) A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews (1994)

Themes and Style Southern Gothic – Time magazine explains Southern Gothic as, “the demented, the deformed, the queer.” Welty incorporated the stereotypes, myths and the clichés associated with the South into her stories. An example of this would be “The Petrified Man.” Fairytales – Not your typical story like Cinderella. It is considered fantasy due to the language she uses in the stories and the way she makes the stories magical and artificial. They are like a fable, making it hard to believe, for example, The Robber Bridegroom.

“Why I Live at the P.O.” Considered on of Welty’s best work. Interpretation: Welty explains, “it was and exercise in using the spoken work to tell a story. The geographical isolation of Southerners is a motivation that encourages our sense of exaggeration and the comic as well as expresses the true concern that people fell for each other.”

Story and Analysis The story and its analyses are not mirror-opposites of each other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what the writer is learning to do. —Eudora Welty, On Writing

Photography Works Progress Administration Photographs during Great Depression

Photography

Young Welty

Some Short Stories “Powerhouse” “Petrified Man” “Why I Live at the P. O.” “Death of a Traveling Salesman” “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” “A Worn Path”

Why Read Eudora Welty?  Works have a strong sense of character and place  Simple to read, yet with underlying depth and theme  Wonderful sense of humor  “Characters often consist of involuted Southern families, physically handicapped, mentally retarded or unstable kinfolk” (Klinkowitz 2147).  Undercurrents of death, violence and degradation  Sense of realism in characterization

References  Johnston, Carol. “Eudora Welty” The Mississippi Writers Page.  Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Eudora Welty” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7 th ed. Vol. E. Ed. Nina Baym et al. New York: Norton,  welty-awards.htm    