Understanding Eudora Welty by
This work offers close readings of Eudora Welty's novels and short stories (including One Writer's Beginnings). At the same time, it sifts through contemporary reviews and recent criticism. The author suggests that understanding the critical history of Welty's canon is vital.
The Critical Response to Eudora Welty's Fiction by
Eudora Welty holds a prominent position among Southern writers, receiving critical attention in publications that scan a wide range of interests. Journals that specialize in American literature, journals that publish general essays, and journals that focus on Southern literature frequently include articles about her works. Her writings have been included in anthologies and have been adapted for the stage and television. This book traces the evolving critical response to her fiction. In a lucid introductory essay, Champion presents an overview and summarizes the body of criticism on Welty's fiction. The rest of the volume presents representative selections of criticism from the initial reception of Welty's work to the present day. The selections are grouped in chapters devoted to Welty's principal writings. Her fiction is treated chronologically, and the selections within each chapter are also arranged in chronological order. Thus the book charts the development of Welty criticism over an extended period of time. A bibliography of works for further reading completes the volume.
The Heart of the Story by
New scholarly vistas for the study of Welty's stories. Winner of the 1991
A Dark Rose by
From the heartbroken protagonist she depicted in her first published story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," to the reflective widow she described in her last novel, The Optimist's Daughter, Eudora Welty wrote realistically about the shadows and radiance of love. In a meticulous exploration of this theme, Sally Wolff combines new readings of Welty's fiction with contextual information and background drawn from a nineteen-year friendship with Welty. A common image in much of Welty's fiction, the rose has traditionally symbolized love in literature. Wolff argues that the dark rose-from the height of its brilliance to the end of its life-serves as an apt metaphor for the dichotomies Welty presents, equally suggestive of beauty and sadness, as well as the comic, tragic, and mysterious qualities of love. While some of Welty's characters seem autobiographical-a daughter remembering her parents' marriage or a broodingly hopeful member of a large family wedding-at times Welty analyzes from a distance the dynamics of successful and troubled loving relationships. Although Welty experienced love several times during her life, she never married, and Wolff argues that this vantage point allowed Welty to write from an objective perspective in her fiction about the varied dimensions of love. A Dark Rose explores several texts to examine Welty's nuanced and intricate portrayals of love. Though love in Welty's fiction fails, wears thin, and even faces death-it remains a vital force in her characters' lives.
A Tyrannous Eye by
A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty's Nonfiction and Photographs is the first book-length study of Eudora Welty's full range of achievements in nonfiction and photography. A preeminent Welty scholar, Pearl Amelia McHaney offers clear-eyed and complex assessments of Welty's journalism, book reviews, letters, essays, autobiography, and photographs. Each chapter focuses on one genre, filling in gaps left by previous books. With keen skills of observation, finely tuned senses, intellect, wit, awareness of audience, and modesty, Welty applied her genius in all that she did, holding a tough line on truth, breaking through "the veil of indifference to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's plight." McHaney's study brings critical attention to the under-evaluated genres of Welty's work and discusses the purposeful use of arguments, examples, and styles, demonstrating that Welty pursued her craft to a high standard across genres with a greater awareness of context than she admitted in her numerous interviews. Welty consistently dared new styles, new audiences, and new publishing venues in order to express her ideas to their fullest, always with readers in mind. It is "serious daring," as she wrote in One Writer's Beginnings, that makes for great writing. In "Place in Fiction," Welty asks, "How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable part of the joy of doing."
Eudora Welty and Surrealism by
Eudora Welty and Surrealism surveys Welty's fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. The study shows how the 1930s witnessed surrealism's arrival in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City, where the surrealists exhibited, and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism's perspective in her writing. In fact, Welty's first solo exhibition of her photographs in 1936 took place next door to New York's premier venue for surrealist art. In a series of readings that collectively examine A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, the book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty's striking figurative literature. Yet the influence of the surrealist movement extends beyond questions of style. The study's interpretations also foreground how her writing refracted surrealism as a historical phenomenon. Scattered throughout her stories are allusions to personalities allied with the movement in the United States, including figures such as Salvador Dalí, Elsa Schiaparelli, Caresse Crosby, Wallace Simpson, Cecil Beaton, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Henri Ford. Individuals such as these and others whom surrealism seduced often lead unorthodox and controversial lives that made them natural targets for moral opprobrium. Eschewing such parochialism, Welty borrowed the idiom of surrealism to develop modernized depictions of the South, a literary strategy that revealed not only cultural farsightedness but great artistic daring.
Eudora Welty by
This work is based on and examines the premise that the vision of reality projected in Welty's writing is of a holistic rather than a dualistic nature. Selected by CHOICE as an Outstanding Academic Book in 1992.
Eudora Welty by
This research and study guide is ideal as an introduction to the featured author. Covering four to six short stories, critical analysis of each work is offered with a variety of viewpoints by different critics.'
Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories by
This collection combines stories set in Welty's special province, the rural South, with stories having a European locale. This gives a wider range to her fiction and demonstrates the remarkable talent of one of the finest short-story writers of our time. "Humorous, piquant, graceful" (Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Sewanee Review).
A Curtain of Green by
This is the first collection of Welty's stories, originally published in 1941. It includes such classics as A Worn Path; Petrified Man; Why I Live at the P.O.; and Death of a Traveling Salesman; The historic Introduction by Katherine Anne Porter brought Welty to the attention of the American reading public.
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by
With a preface written by the author especially for this edition, this is the complete collection of stories by Eudora Welty. Including the earlier collectionsA Curtain of Green,The Wide Net,The Golden Apples, andThe Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected ones, these forty-one stories demonstrate Eudora Welty's talent for writing from diverse points-of-view with "vision that is sweet by nature, always humanizing, uncannily objective, but never angry" (Washington Post).
Delta Wedding by
A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family’s preparations for her cousin Dabney’s wedding.
The First Story by
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909, ninety years ago. In celebration, this book marks the occasion by reprinting "Death of a Traveling Salesman, " her first published story. It set the tone and established the high artistry of distinguished work that was to follow it over the course of more than half a century. It appeared in a little magazine called Manuscript in 1936 as the astonishingly mature work of a young writer. Welty was 27. Included here is an essay she wrote at the request of The Georgia Review. It is her reflection over her long career and a new look into her first piece of fiction to appear before the public eye. Included also are three black-and-white photographs taken by Welty in the 1930s. These show the setting of the story, rural Mississippi of the Depression years.
The Golden Apples by
Welty is on home ground in the state of Mississippi in this collection of seven stories. She portrays the MacLains, the Starks, the Moodys, and other families of the fictitious town of Morgana; I doubt that a better book about the South - one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life and its special tone and pattern-has ever been written. (New Yorker).
Occasions by
Occasions is a celebration of the short works of one of America's most beloved writers. To mark the centennial of Eudora Welty's birth, Pearl Amelia McHaney has collected more than sixty pieces by Welty (1909-2001) that are largely unknown and have not been reprinted since their first appearances in magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers. The gathering includes one of Welty's earliest stories, "Acrobats in the Park"; a self-analysis of her art printed in the Twenty Photographs portfolio; a recipe for Aunt Beck's Chicken Pie served up in the novel Losing Battles; and a parody of Edmund Wilson's scurrilous New Yorker review of one of William Faulkner's late novels. These occasional essays, tributes, stories, and comments will delight readers and reveal more of the genius of a favorite author deeply engaged with her people and their customs. In these pieces Welty put pen to paper for just causes: electing honorable officials, selling war bonds, promoting reading and the arts. Her sophistication and insight resonate in tributes to Isak Dinesen, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy as well as in reviews of sculpture, painting, dance, and photography, and in her candid remarks about her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Optimist's Daughter. Her sly humor emerges in "Women!! Make Turban in Own Home!," a delightful parody of projects suggested in Popular Mechanics. Written between the 1930s and the 1990s, these fictions, essays, commemorations, reviews, and salutes reveal the sparkling imagination of a celebrated writer who continues her hold on a wide audience through these newfound pleasures.
One Time, One Place by
Eudora Welty's photographs of Mississippi during the Great Depression
One Writer's Beginnings by
Now available as an audio CD, in Eudora Welty's own voice, or as a book. Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a continuous thread of revelation she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction. Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who lovesgood writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.
The Optimist's Daughter by
This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations.
Eudora Welty : Photographs by 
The Robber Bridegroom by
Legendary figures of Mississippi’s past-flatboatman Mike Fink and the dreaded Harp brothers-mingle with characters from Eudora Welty’s own imagination in an exuberant fantasy set along the Natchez Trace. Berry-stained bandit of the woods Jamie Lockhart steals Rosamond, the beautiful daughter of pioneer planter Clement Musgrove, to set in motion this frontier fairy tale. “For all her wild, rich fancy, Welty writes prose that is as disciplined as it is beautiful” (New Yorker).
Some Notes on River Country by
The Mississippi river country from Vicksburg to Natchez was a source and a setting for several of Eudora Welty's early stories and for her novel The Robber Bridegroom. Her eloquent essay about this region, reprinted here with a selection of her black-and-white photographs, is a reflection on the development and history of these lands in the old American Southwest in a time before and in the years just after the Louisiana Purchase. Originally published in Harper's Bazaar in 1944, this piece evokes both the elemental terrain and notables who traversed it via the river and the Natchez Trace--Aaron Burr, the flatboatman Mike Fink, the villainous Harpe brothers, and John James Audubon, as well as assorted fire-and-brimstone preachers, bandits, planters, and Native Americans. In Some Notes on River Country, a dreamlike meandering through the landscape in eloquent prose and evocative photographs, Welty's empathetic presence is felt. Taking the reader on an imagined journey, Welty combines the genres of travel narrative, character study, and geographical history to give a grand tour of the region. This brilliant portrait of a place is both elegiac and animated as she shows how much has changed, how much can never be recovered, and how much of the old river country remains in its contemporary incarnation. The essay and photographs explore the Natchez Trace, Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Natchez, Rodney's Landing, and other locales, offering insight on their quirky denizens, their significant history, and their entrancing uniqueness. In this setting Welty discovered a presence and a sense of place that stimulated her artistic vision and imbued her work forever after. Eudora Welty, one of America's most acclaimed and honored writers, is the author of many novels and story collections, including The Optimist's Daughter (Pulitzer Prize), Losing Battles, The Ponder Heart, The Robber Bridegroom, A Curtain of Green, and The Wide Net. Three collections of her photographic work--Photographs, Country Churchyards, and One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression--were published by the University Press of Mississippi.
A Daring Life by
Mississippi author Eudora Welty, the first living writer to be published in the Library of America series, mentored many of today's greatest fiction writers and is a fascinating woman, having lived the majority of the twentieth century (1909-2001). Her life reflects a century of change and is closely entwined with many events that mark our recent history. This biography follows this twentieth-century path while telling Welty's story, beginning with her parents and their important influence on her reading and writing life. The chapters that follow focus on her education and her most important teachers; her life during the Depression and how her career, just getting started, is interrupted by World War II; and how she shows independence and courage through her writing during the turbulent civil rights period of the 1950s and 1960s. After years of care giving and the deaths of all her immediate family members, Welty persevered and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter. Her popularity soared in the 1980s after she delivered the three William E. Massey Lectures to standing-room-only crowds at Harvard, and the lectures were later published as One Writer's Beginnings and became a New York Times bestseller. This biography intends to introduce readers to one of the most significant women writers of the past century, a prolific author who transcends her Mississippi roots and has written short stories, novels, and non-fiction that will endure for all time.
Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller by
The essays collected in this volume examine the range of Welty's talent. Originally prepared for the Eye of the Storyeller Conference on Eudora Welty held at the University of Akron, 17-19 September 1987, these essays bring together work by some of the Welty scholars writing today. The originating idea of the conference was power - a topic not often linked to Welty. But power, subtle and overt, demonstrated by technique and vision, is central to most of the analyses. Some critics elected to treat technical manifestations of power as revealed through Welty's experiments in voice and style. Others chose to view power as it is exercised in communities or by the individual in conflict with that community.
More Conversations with Eudora Welty by
Collections of interviews with Eudora Welty
One Writer's Imagination by
"In One Writer's Imagination, Suzanne Marrs draws upon nearly twenty years of conversations, interviews, and friendship with Eudora Welty to discuss the intersections between biography and art in the Pulitzer Prize winner's work. Through an engaging chronological and comprehensive reading of the Welty canon, Marrs describes the ways Welty's creative process transformed and transfigured fact to serve the purposes of fiction. She points to the sparks that lit Welty's imagination - an imagination that thrived on polarities in her personal life and in society at large."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Welty: Complete Novels by
One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, Eudora Welty's novels and stories blend the storytelling tradition of the South with a modernist sensibility attuned to the mysteries and ambiguities of experience. In this Library of America volume and its companion, Welty explores the complex abundance of southern, and particularly Southern women's, lives with an artistry that Salman Rushdie has called "impossible to overpraise." In a career spanning five decades, she chronicled her own Mississippi with a depth and intensity matched only by William Faulkner. Complete Novels gathers all of Welty's longer fiction in one volume for the first time. In The Robber Bridegroom (1942), based on a Grimm fairy tale, legendary figures from Mississippi's past, such as the keel-boat captain Mike Fink and the savage outlaws the Harp Brothers, mingle with Welty's own imaginings in a free-ranging and boisterous fantasy set along the Natchez Trace. The richly textured Delta Wedding (1946), set against a backdrop of rural Mississippi in the 1920s, vividly portrays the intricacies of family relationships in its account of the sprawling Fairchild clan--with their "family trait of quick, upturning smiles, instant comprehension of the smallest eddy of life in the current of the day, which would surely be entered in a kind of reckless pleasure"--and their Delta plantation Shellmound. Edna Earle Ponder's unrestrained and delightfully absurd monologue, superb in its capturing of the rhythms of country speech, shows Welty's humor at its idiomatic best in The Ponder Heart (1954), a flight of invention culminating in a murder trial that becomes an occasion for exuberant comedy. The monumental Losing Battles (1970), composed over fifteen years, brings Welty's imaginative gifts to the largest canvass of her career, rendering a Depression-era family reunion with mythic scope and ebullient comic vigor. The volume concludes with The Optimist's Daughter (1972), a taut and moving story of a woman rediscovering the world of her childhood as she comes to terms with her father's death. Often considered her masterpiece, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1972. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Welty: Stories, essays, & memoir by
In this volume along with its companion, The Library of America presents all of the most significant and best-loved works of Eudora Welty. Of her own work, she wrote: "What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high." Stories, Essays and Memoir presents Welty's collected short stories, an astonishing body of work that has made her one of the most respected writers of short fiction. A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941), her first book, includes many of her most popular stories, such as "A Worn Path." "Powerhouse," and the farcical "Why I Live at the P.O." The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), in which historical figures such as Aaron Burr ("First Love") and John James Audubon ("A Still Moment") appear as characters, shows her evolving mastery as a regional chronicler. The Golden Apples (1946) is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. It was Welty's favorite among her books, and she described it as "an experience in a writer's own discovery of affinities. In writing, as in life, the connections of all sorts of relationships and kinds lie in wait of discovery, and give out their signals to the Geiger counter of the charged imagination, once it is drawn into the right field." The stories of The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are set both in the American South and in Europe. Also included are two stories from the 1960s, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?", based on the shooting of Medgar Evers, and "The Demonstrators." A selection of nine literary and personal essays includes evocations of the Jackson, Mississippi, of her youth that is essential to her work ("The Little Store," "A Sweet Devouring") and cogent discussions of literary form ("Writing and Analyzing a Story," "Place in Fiction"). The volume concludes with One Writer's Beginnings (1984), the sensitive memoir of her childhood, which has become one of the most widely read of her books. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The Welty Collection by
The Welty Collection: A Guide to the Eudora Welty Manuscripts and Documents at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History includes five chapters. Chapter one concerns manuscript holdings in the collection. Here I have listed and described typescripts of Welty's many books as well as typescripts of her uncollected and unpublished works; the annotated entries typically do not delineate the nature of revisions to individual typescripts, but I discuss the revisions at some length in the introduction to chapter one. Chapter two describes the negatives and printed photographs in the Welty Collection and includes commentary about selected photographs. Chapter three provides a calendar of the Welty correspondence, a summary of each letter, and an identification of the correspondents and of individuals mentioned in the letters. Chapter four lists the Welty publications that are part of the collection, and chapter five lists the secondary materials Welty has given to the Department of Archives and History. The guide concludes with appendixes citing other collections that are relevant to the study of Welty's fiction.
This guide should make the Welty Collection readily accessible to scholars.
A Writer's Eye by
Although she is eminent primarily as the prize-winning author of classic works of fiction, Eudora Welty is notable also as an astute literary critic. Her essays on the art of fiction and on the writers who enlarged the range of the short story and the novel are definitive pieces. Her distinguished book reviews, along with her critical essays, augment her reputation for being one of the most discerning author-critics in literary America. This collection of her book reviews manifests the connecting of her penetrating eye with her responsive intellect in forming sympathetic judgments of the books she reviewed. Between 1942 and 1984 Welty wrote sixty-seven reviews of seventy-four books. Fifty-eight of these appeared in the New York Times Book Review , and others in the Saturday Review of Literature, Tomorrow, theHudson Review, the New York Post, and the Sewanee Review. The reviewed books include novels, short story collections, books of essays, biographies and memoirs, books of letters, children's books, books of ghost stories, photography books, books of literary criticism, and books of World War II art. Over nearly half a century she reviewed books by some of the foremost authors of her time: Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, V.S. Pritchett, Colette, Isak Dinesen, E.B. White, E.M. Forster, J.D. Salinger, Ross Macdonald, Patrick White, S.J. Perelman, Annie DIllard, Elizabeth Bowen, and Katherine Anne Porter. A Writer's Eye includes all of Welty's book reviews, even one published in the under the pseudonym "Michael Ravenna." SIxteen of the reviews were collected previously in Welty's The Eye of the Story (1978). In this collection Pearl Amelia McHaney's introduction records the history of Welty's career in book reviewing and illuminates the honestly and compassion with which Welty wrote reviews. Welty's keen vision, her wit, and her refined style make these "monuments to interruption," a phrase she wrote in description of Virginia Woolf's essays and reviews, an important record of her literary standards and special interests. They show us as well how book reviewing consumed a large measure of creative time that she customarily devoted to fiction writing. Placed beside her authoritative critical essays, this volume enhances Welty's considerable literary stature and completes the image of Eudora Welty as a consummate woman of letters.