Eudora Welty Books

There are terrific reviews already on this site, and I can add little to what has already been said. I've been a Welty fan since discovering her work 40 years ago, and have a reply from her from many, many years ago when I wrote her a rather gushing fan letter in grade school.

I suppose that, like many Welty fans, I concentrated on her work. I'd read peripherally about her friendship with Porter and others, and I've enjoyed her photographic work. I'd also read One Writer's Beginnings. However, this work goes much deeper into Miss Welty's personal life than I'd been exposed to before. Who can say what's tragic or sad in another's life? We all create our existence to different muses.

I was delighted to find this book, and appreciate Ms. Marrs's scholarship.

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909 and died July 23, 2001. She was a Southern woman and that simple fact was what initially brought her to my attention so many years ago. I so enjoy the Southern writer. And Eudora Welty is no exception. Welty is a critically acclaimed writer of essays, short stories and novels. Hers are the stories that I return to every so often, always finding something new in them.

Welty's 1984 memoir One Writer's Beginning was her own personal life account. And while that was interesting it is this biography that seems to fill in the blanks with substance; probably because the author had a distance Welty didn't. What I found most interesting is the author's ability to humanize this icon of literature. Welty was first and foremost a woman who though she had an extreme talent, enjoyed humor, loved deeply (even though she never married), had numerous friends (many who were writers), loved her mother (whom people thought dominated Welty) and thought of New York as her second home.

Welty was definitely not the "old maid" some thought she was. She fell in love with a man who cared for her but also was interested in men. She then lost in love with a married man who was stricken with Alzheimer's. But it was the long-term relationship with Kenneth Millar (detective fiction writer Ross Macdonald) that will make your heart skip a beat. They met at the Algonquin Hotel and corresponded with each other twice each month. They only spent a total of six weeks together over the years but they always believed that fate brought them together.

I enjoyed the small items in this book: that Welty admired Langston Hughes's poetry and that osteoporosis took six inches from her five-foot-ten height. Especially touching are the memories of the relationship with Ken Millar.

Marrs book is a complete, considerate and grand account of the life of an important American literary icon. It is a book that I will revisit just like her body of work. Armchair Interviews says her work, like her biography is something to be read, reread and savored.

Solid research by a top Eudora Welty scholar is coupled here with close friendship in the last 15 years of Welty's long life. Suzanne Marrs friendship with Welty gave her unparalleled access to papers and a wide circle of Eudora Welty's friends.

In addition to the text there is a delightful section of 16 pages of photos ranging from Welty's childhood through old age--including a few she took herself.

Welty emerges from the pages of Marrs' biography as a woman engaged in the world--not sheltered from it as the popular myth of her life suggested. Even during the years of her so-called Writer's Block, she traveled widely and worked hard to craft and deliver speeches at colleges and universities that are later gathered into essays.

I was particularly touched by the passages relating to her involvement in taking care of her mother in old age and of how she strove--ultimately not for publication--to transform her pain at Ken Millar's (aka Ross Macdonald) Alzheimer's.

Although she grieved as close friends died, Eudora Welty also seems a wonderful model for vigorous aging as she kept active, involved, tried new things, and kept a cadre of acquaintances of all ages in her orbit.

--Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

I like Suzanne Marrs' book but it is less a conventional biography than an annotated account of every social visit and trip abroad taken by Eudora Welty during her eighty plus years of living.

Welty seemed to enjoy her reputation as an outsider artist, and from her Mississippi roots she took strength, but she sure was connected to the bigtime power brokers of New York and London. No wonder her career took off so early. If your best friends were Mary Lou Aswell, the premiere fiction editor of the day, and oh, William and Emmy Maxwell, the NEW YORKER fiction editor and his wealthy wife, your career would skyrocket too. She won them all over with a winning combination of direct honesty, Southern charm, a real curiosity about the lives of others, and a nose for showing up all the right parties. Marrs shows us a Welty obsessed as Paris Hilton with making the rounds and being seen everywhere, and if you took out all the parties, dinners, and chic foreign travel, this giant biography would be about 80 pages. Elizabeth Bowen told British readers that DELTA WEDDING was "new" and "great," didn't mention their deep friendship. As one reads the book the spectacle of one hand washing the other, of sheer log rolling, is a living thing, frightening in its implications. First Welty created her own career, then it seemed to take over

And sad, sad, sad! If you credit Marrs' reading of Welty's life, she spent years pining after a man who turned out to be gay, and then when she was an old lady she fell in love with a fellow novelist, one married to yet a third. Pining away after Ross Macdonald (Ken Millar), she didn't care what people thought. She would give his books favorable reviews in the NEW YORK TIMES, why not? They dedicated books to each other and played out their celebrity romance in public, a mutual admiration society people enjoyed observing the way they liked to see Agatha Christie married to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, as two orders of celebrity drawn to each other like iron filings to a magnet. Was Millar in love with Welty? He told Reynolds Price he was. However, Marrs is big on "perhaps" (a word used over two hundred forty times in her biography) and it's hard to pin her down. The thrust of Marr's biography is to utterly destroy what's left of the reputation on Margaret Millar, the brilliant crime writer Ross Macdonald stayed married to. It's as if I was writing a biography of Angelina Jolie and felt compelled to obliterate poor Jennifer Aniston by concentrating solely on her bad habits and not on her possibly hurt feelings. When Welty hears the news that Margaret Millar has finally died, her response is terse and grim. "'Thank you for the information,' was Eudora's only reply."

Marrs, an academic working in Mississippi loved Eudora herself and by her own admission became one of her best young friend. And hence she might be chary of saying anything analytical or remotely critical about Welty. Unseemly is the number of pages she spends demolishing a previous biographer who had the temerity to call Welty "homely." It's pathetic that Marrs should have found it necessary to insist on Welty's good looks. I'm sorry, but if Ann Waldron's book may have suffered from a lack of cooperation from Welty's friends, at least it tried to penetrate the surface of America's best loved author. Too many friends will obscure the real subject of a biography, as well as too little. The one place where Marrs' book is compelling is in the slow, detailed analysis of Welty's last 30 years and how she wound up in a nightmare of being unable to write fiction. Surrounded by sycophants and scholars who, by the 1970s, had established a Eudora Welty industry, she lived in a state of denial, accepting by Marrs' count 39 honorary degrees in part, or so it seems, to reassure herself that she was universally adored. She had trouble saying no, and she'd go to the opening of an envelope. It was a terrible waste, and yet, what else could she do to find a scrap of happiness? She had to know people loved her. Scholars and helpers wound up keeping her name in the public eye by compiling new books of her own writings, publishing limited editions of her juvenilia, having her sign limited edition copies, and arranging for numerous TV interviews.

Occasionally Marrs lets the "beloved" mask slip and shows us glimpses of what might have been the real Welty. Her unexplained hatred of Martha Gellhorn--that "phony"--is one such opening. Or when Bill Maxwell, exasperated by Welty's whining, asks her how she could possibly be "broke" when she has a musical running on Broadway. Marrs has an empathic, eccentric style of her own, given to oratorical repetition. "This is not to say that Eudora had become a pacifist. She had not." Sometimes she seems to have an axe to grind herself. What's the point in demonizing the late Norma Brickell, for example, referring to her offhandedly, without a single citation, as a "notoriously dominating personality"? Could it be that Eudora resented Norma for having married Herschel Brickell, one of Welty's platonic boyfriends? If so, why not say so? Norma Brickell is unjustly maligned here and no one is going to speak up on her behalf. It wasn't Norma who voted against Eudora getting her nth Guggenheim--no, it was Herschel, "because, as he put it, "Them as has gits."

I hope that Marrs will devote her energies on Welty's behalf to the extent of preparing editions of the two abandoned novel projects that caused her idol so much suffering, the novel called "Nicotiana" or "The Last of the Figs," and the 70s rape revenge tale she refers to as "The Shadow Club." It would be a shame indeed if none of this material was made available to Welty's vast public. Look how Hemingway's estate authorized the publication of novel after novel, after Hemingway's suicide. Spruced up and with forewords by Richard Ford or Reynolds Price, we'd have a new couple of Welty bestsellers on our hands.

There seems to be something provincial about any writer that lives in Mississippi. They cannot be viewed as normal people. When they are female, far from beautiful, remain unmarried, somewhat sequestered, a name like Eudora, and live with their mother, the image comes unbidden of a demure Southern Lady, incapable of expressing emotion, if they have any. Eudora Welty fit this image perfectly, and because she did it is too easy to dismiss her writing as worthless.

Then you look at the prizes:Pulitzer, National Book, eight (yes 8) O. Henry's, National Medal of Literature, Medal of Freedom. There had to be something more behind the image, something of life to give the understanding for such insight.

Ms. Marrs biography does an excellent job of giving life to Eudora Welty. That she considered New York her alternate home. That she was for integration in a segregationist South. That the loves in her life happened to be unavailable, but that they indeed were there.

Ms. Marrs book provides a view of Eudora Welty that rounds out her life in a most plesant way.

"Listening," "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice," Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography "One Writer's Beginnings," the concluding entry in this collection, one of the two Library of America compilations dedicated to her work. And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty's compact autobiography is notable both because it allows a rare glimpse into the celebrated writer's otherwise fiercely protected private life and it illustrates the roots from which sprang such extraordinary protagonists as "The Ponder Heart"'s Edna Earle and Daniel Ponder, Miss Eckhart and the Morgana families in "The Golden Apples" and, of course, the anti-heroes of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Optimist's Daughter," Judge McKelva, his second wife Fay and (most importantly) his daughter Laurel.

A native and - with minimal exceptions - lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi, Welty received her first introduction to storytelling as a listener; and early on, learned to sharpen her ears not only to a story's contents but also to its narrator and its protagonists' individual nature: "[T]here [never was] a line read that I didn't hear," and "any room ... at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to," she notes in "One Writer's Beginnings," adding that the discovery that all those stories had been written by someone, not come into existence of their own, not only surprised but also severely disappointed her. Equally importantly, family visits to relatives brought out the born observer in her; each trip providing its own lessons and revelations, each a story onto itself - the seed from which later grew the literary creations collected in this compilation and its companion volume. At the same time, her father's interest in technology introduced her to photography as a means of capturing visual impressions, one moment at a time; and when traveling around Mississippi as an agent for a state agency (her first job) she learned to use that camera as "a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know" and discovered that "to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was [then] the greatest need I had" ("One Writer's Beginnings:" Not surprisingly, her photography was published in several collections which have found much acclaim of their own.)

Thus, from early childhood on, Eudora Welty not only had a keen sense of the world around her but also, of words as such: of their existence as much as the interrelation between their sound, physical appearance and the things they stand for. Encouraged by her mother, a teacher, and over her father's worries (he considered fiction writing an occupation of dubitable financial promise and, worse, inferior to fact because it was "not true") Welty embarked on a writer's path which would lead her to award-winning heights and to a reputation as one of the South's finest writers, with as abounding as obvious comparisons to fellow Mississippian William Faulkner in particular; a literary debt she acknowledged when she wrote that "his work, though it can't increase in itself, increases us" and "[w]hat is written in the South from now on is going to be taken into account by Faulkner's work" ("Must the Novelist Crusade?", 1965). The Library of America dedicated two volumes to her work; one containing her novels, the other - this one - her short stories, essays (some, like her autobiography, based on a series of lectures) and her autobiography.

An approach that Welty developed early on was to consider the publication of her stories in periodicals merely a step towards each story's final shape, and she generally revised her stories before including them in collections. This compilation brings together all her short stories in the versions intended to be final by Welty herself: the 1941 edition of "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (her first short story collection), the 1943 edition of "The Wide Net and Other Stories" and the 1949 edition of "The Golden Apples" - each collection suffered substantial editorial revisions in subsequent publications. Included are also two stand-alone short stories ("Where is This Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators"), the first one inspired by the 1963 murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers and revised by Welty over the telephone after having been accepted by "The New Yorker," to avoid a potentially prejudicial effect of its original ending on the then-impending trial.

A keen observer, Welty was also a writer endowed with a sharp sense of humor and satire, and with the gift to brilliantly use location, localisms, accents, patterns of speech and customs to make a point. Not a single word is wasted: "Marrying must have been some of his showing off - like man never married at all till *he* flung in," we're told about King MacLain in the opening story of "The Golden Apples," "Shower of Gold." And you don't have to learn anything more about the man, do you? Equally as instructive on Welty's writing are the eight essays included in this collection, all taken from the 1978 compilation "The Eye of the Story" and dealing with particular aspects of her own fiction as much as, more generally, with "Place in Fiction" (1954) and the fiction writer's role ("Writing and Analyzing a Story," originally published in 1955 under the title "How I Write" and substantially revised for its inclusion in "The Eye of the Story" and "Must the Novelist Crusade?").

"There is no explanation outside fiction for what its writer is learning to do," Eudora Welty maintained in "Writing and Analyzing a Story;" explaining that each story references only the writer's vision at the moment of the creation of that story, and the creative process itself: nothing that can be "mapped and plotted" but a product taking shape in the process of creation itself, giving each story a unique identity of its own. And while her fiction, alas, can no longer grow any more than Faulkner's, she has left us enough of those unique creations to cherish for a long time to come.

At the time of her death, Eudora Welty was widely regarded as America's single greatest living author. Although she produced several critically acclaimed novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, Welty achieved her greatest fame through mastery of that most difficult of all literary forms, the short story.

Welty's skill with short stories is amazing, for she possessed a talent that combined a remarkable ear for the spoken word, meticulous observation of physical world, and the truly mysterious ability to slip almost effortlessly into the very marrow of the characters she depicts. Her comic stories are perhaps best known to the public in general, but she is equally at home with provocative and unsettling material, and although her tales are most often firmly rooted in America's deep south they have a sense of humanity that transcends the limitations of purely regional literature.

In addition to stories previously collected under the titles A CURTAIN OF GREEN, THE WIDE NET, THE GOLDEN APPLES, and THE BRIDE OF THE INNISFALLEN, this Library of America publication also includes the independently published stories "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators," nine selected essays, and Welty's memoir ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS. A chronology of Welty's life up to 1996, textual notes, and general notes (including Katherine Anne Porter's introduction for A CURTAIN OF GREEN) are also included. This book (and its Library of America) companion, EUDORA WELTY: COMPLETE NOVELS) are essentials for any one who admires Welty's work and wishes to possess it in handy, collected form; those who have had limited exposure to Welty's work, however, might be better served by smaller collections.

Each new volume from The Library of America, the non-profit publisher that has become the de facto literary hall of fame, is a cause for celebration. Its goal of preserving in an enduring format the best fiction and non-fiction is a significant bulwark against the encroaching tides of cultural relativism that attempts to render any value judgments meaningless, as well as a consumer society that insists that if it ain't new, it ain't good.

In the case of Eudora Welty, we're given two volumes: a collection of five novels ("The Robber Bridegroom," "Delta Wedding," "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles" and the Pulitzer-winning "The Optimist's Daughter"), and another of her essays, her memoir "One Writer's Beginnings" and her short stories. From her first published short stories, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in 1937, to her last novel in 1972, Welty captures with her highly readable style and sharp eye and ear the varieties and eccentricities of Southern life.

But while the South claims Welty as one of its own, she may not necessarily return the favor. Teh cause is both geographic and a matter of choice. Although she was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1909 and lived there all her life, her father was from Ohio and her mother from West Virginia, a state created by the Civil War that went for the Union. This isn't Margaret Mitchell we're talking about here.

Then, in her essay "Place in Fiction," she stresses that while it is important for a writer to capture the feeling of an area, it is not the paramount goal in fiction:

"It is through place that we put out roots ... but where those roots reach toward ... is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding."

But what pedigree does not provide, her environment probably did, for her work contains those elements poularly associated with Southern fiction. "Delta Wedding" celebrates the Southern family through the sprawling Fairchild clan and its passel of sons, daughters, cousins, aunts, great-aunts, nieces and nephews, all involved in each others' lives to a degree rarely seen today.

Many of her stories revolve around characters marginalized by society, struggling to exist and reach out to others: the simple Lily Daw who tries to evade the determination of the town's ladies to either marry her off or send her to the asylum; the generous, slightly retarded Daniel Ponder who would give away everything he has at the drop of a hat; the demented Clytie in "A Curtain of Green," who rushes about looking in people's faces until, seeing her reflection in a barrel of rainwater, dives in and drowns.

Eudora Welty was a sharp, perceptive writer, and her enshrinement by the Library of America is most welcome.

I began my acquaintance with Eudora Welty's works in college with One Writer's Beginnings and fell in love with the lyrics of her writing. I moved on to her short stories where I believe Ms. Welty surely shines brightest, but her novels are almost as wonderful. Very few people have the depth of insight into the mind and motivations of southerners that Eudora Welty has. She is right up there with William Faulkner. She has the gift of seeing and conveying the universal experiences of her decidedly regional cast of characters.

Since this is a collection of all of Ms. Welty's novels it is difficult to give a concise review. Suffice it to say that for reading pleasure you will not spend better money. The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize, but Losing Battles may be even better (the novel centers on all of the family stories told at a huge family reunion--great framing device for so many wonderful tales). The Robber Bridegroom is a southern fairy tale.

Eudora Welty is a giant of literature. This is a great Library of America collection. Buy it!

Each new volume from The Library of America, the non-profit publisher that has become the de facto literary hall of fame, is a cause for celebration. Its goal of preserving in an enduring format the best fiction and non-fiction is a significant bulwark against the encroaching tides of cultural relativism that attempts to render any value judgments meaningless, as well as a consumer society that insists that if it ain't new, it ain't good.

In the case of Eudora Welty, we're given two volumes: a collection of five novels ("The Robber Bridegroom," "Delta Wedding," "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles" and the Pulitzer-winning "The Optimist's Daughter"), and another of her essays, her memoir "One Writer's Beginnings" and her short stories. From her first published short stories, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in 1937, to her last novel in 1972, Welty captures with her highly readable style and sharp eye and ear the varieties and eccentricities of Southern life.

But while the South claims Welty as one of its own, she may not necessarily return the favor. Teh cause is both geographic and a matter of choice. Although she was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1909 and lived there all her life, her father was from Ohio and her mother from West Virginia, a state created by the Civil War that went for the Union. This isn't Margaret Mitchell we're talking about here.

Then, in her essay "Place in Fiction," she stresses that while it is important for a writer to capture the feeling of an area, it is not the paramount goal in fiction:

"It is through place that we put out roots ... but where those roots reach toward ... is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding."

But what pedigree does not provide, her environment probably did, for her work contains those elements poularly associated with Southern fiction. "Delta Wedding" celebrates the Southern family through the sprawling Fairchild clan and its passel of sons, daughters, cousins, aunts, great-aunts, nieces and nephews, all involved in each others' lives to a degree rarely seen today.

Many of her stories revolve around characters marginalized by society, struggling to exist and reach out to others: the simple Lily Daw who tries to evade the determination of the town's ladies to either marry her off or send her to the asylum; the generous, slightly retarded Daniel Ponder who would give away everything he has at the drop of a hat; the demented Clytie in "A Curtain of Green," who rushes about looking in people's faces until, seeing her reflection in a barrel of rainwater, dives in and drowns.

Eudora Welty was a sharp, perceptive writer, and her enshrinement by the Library of America is most welcome.

This is a knockout of a book. This is what readers and fans of the great writers want to know, the author's career history, how they first attracted attention and made literary history. Fascinating insights into Miss Welty's decades long business relationship and friendship with her agent Mr. Russell, touching and beautiful. This is what we want, not some conjecture-ridden tacky piece of slop like Ann Weldron's "biography" of Miss Welty.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable collection of interviews and profiles on the legendary miss Welty that were published in various magazines and newspapers. Great for research into Miss Welty's thoughts on writing, writers, and her work.

I thought about giving this four stars because as an offering it is slim, but then, Eudora Welty is a five star writer and these testimonies from others are first rate. There is a redemptive quality to Welty's writing. She is living disproof of the neurotic artist. Fred Chappell refers to her present dreadnought fame and adds that she was always admired by other writers.

In reading "Why I live at the P.O." Tony Earley realized that people in literature spoke as he did. He believes the story has never lost its miraculous sheen. Welty was a teacher of Ellen Gilchrist.

Eudora Welty is a dominant figure in American literature as she has pursued her examinations of illusions and delusions, prejudice and violence. Reynolds Price notes that he and Welty share a joy in having such unbounded worlds to watch. One writer remarks that there is mystery in her prose.

Ms. Welty shows those who are desirous of writing fiction what the object and nuances are that make for a piece of good writing. If you've heard over and over again, "don't tell it; show it" then this book will help you understand what "it" looks like.
No exercises to prime the pump or brainstorming sessions here, for while those are useful for developing a skeleton, this book will help you to breathe life into your narrative.

Eudora Welty is one of my favorite authors and to hear her read her own work is priceless.

Eudora Welty is I believe the only author to be honored with a second volume in the "Conversations with" series published by Univerisity of Mississippi - but that has less to do with state pride on their queen of letters than the fact that Welty thoroughly deserves a second volume, not only because of her importance as a writer but because of her keen insights on writing, literature, and life. Ever gracious, she always went out of her way for an interviewer, never treating journalists as if they were pests that had to be dealt with on occasion like some writers. I confess I enjoy reading about Miss Welty almost as much as I do reading her own works, it's so rare to find a major author with such humanity, good humor, and grace. Aspiring authors would do well not just to study her work but to study the woman, Miss Welty was a role model on every level.

At the time of her death, Eudora Welty was considered the single greatest living American author, a writer who (although she actually won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER) made her reputation with that most difficult of all literary forms, the short story. One of America's most frequently anthologized writers, Welty's distinctly Southern tone and the fineness of her over-all work makes her the only regional author whose reputation consistently challenges that of William Faulkner.

This particular collection of Welty's short stories includes all works previously collected under the titles A CURTAIN OF GREEN and THE WIDE NET, which were her first and second published short story volumes, written in the 1930s and 1940s. The stories from the former are widely known, and include such favorites as "The Petrified Man," "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden," "Why I Live at the P.O.," and "The Worn Path." Although less well known, stories from the latter are equally fine, and include such titles as "First Love," "The Wide Net," and "Livvy."

Welty was blessed with a talent for writing from the inside of the character, and in reading her work one consistently feels that one is not so much reading Welty as the writings of the characters she presents--writings rendered with superlative, memorable imagery. But although Welty's work generally consists of character portrait rather than plot-driven material and maintains a stylistically consistent tone, it is remarkably varied, ranging from the outrageously comic to the deeply touching to the profoundly disquieting.

Of particular interest to modern readers is the way in which Welty, who wrote primarily during the era of segregation, addresses race in her work. In one sense, she does not address it at all, for her work is not issue-oriented; at the same time, however, certain aspects of her work (such as characters who occasionally use the 'n' word, which even in the South of this era carried certain implications about the mentality and social class of the person who used it) indicate her awareness of the slow-boil hidden beneath the surface of Southern society. Although it is not included in this particular collection, those interested in Welty's work would do well to read her 1960s story "Where Is The Voice Coming From?," a fearsome portrait of violent racism in action, for Welty's ultimate position on the matter.