Eudora Welty Books

I wasn't that crazy about Dr. Marrs' biography of the troubled Southern writer, and I'm afraid I let her have it on [...].

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The book is handsomely illustrated with a selection of Welty's own fine, evocative photographs, reproduced adequately from the original negatives, which form part of the collection.

Her correspondence is annotated, so we can see that Welty was a favorite of many Broadway and Hollywood stars as early as the 1950s, and an autograph hound would have a great time reading this fan mail from such greats as Julie Harris, Una Merkel, Maurice Evans, John Houseman, and Geraldine Fitzgerald. I wonder if the estate couldn't actually create a small keepsake book based on her mail from famous actresses who loved playing eccentric Southern women in adaptations of Welty's work.

Good work, Dr. Marrs. I hope someday you expand your work here to include the complete range of Welty's writing, both published and not. Reading this book is like the promise of a new day, filled with strange smells and tantalizing glimpses of a mind both at its peak, and later, not doing so great, but still soldiering on valiantly.

This book has a candid southern feel, with a real drawl built into the words. She exposes the writer, Eudora Welty, through her comparison test, as a queen of the south and a mental anomaly. Her rights as a female are also discussed. Even the title runs like river water on the tongue. I enjoyed it.

In this re-issue of Brande's classic (first published in 1934) this author, editor, and writing teacher focuses on the many problems writers face, and she proposes solutions.
John Gardner, in the foreward, writes "The root problems of the writer are personality problems: He or she cannot get started, or starts a story well, then gets lost or loses heart, or writes very well some of the time, badly the rest of the time, or writes brilliantly but after one superb story or novel, cannot write again, etc."
Brande concentrates on the writer's mind and heart, and not on writing technigues. She has set out to address the writer's personality problems, such as lack of confidence, and self-respect.
She asserts that there is a sort of "writer's magic." When addressing the disappointments and rejections that all aspiring writers face, she states, "I hope this book persuades some who are hesitating on the verge of abandoning writing, to make a different decision."
She informs her reader of the four major difficulties she has observed time and again, in her writing students, and writers in general: "The Difficulty of Writing at All," "The One-Book Author," "The Occasional Writer," "The Uneven Writer."
Brande believes that becoming a writer is mainly a matter of cultivating "a writer's temperament." That is "the author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness of a child, the innocence of the eye." Some chapter titles are "Harnessing the Unconscious," "Writing on Schedule," "The Source of Originality," "The Practice Story," and "The Writer's Magic."
The book contains an excellent index, as well as a bibliography. Brande's insights do not feel dated to me. They pertain to the writers of today and provide inspiration, stimulation, valuable exercises, and the hard-earned wisdom of a highly successful writer and teacher. A valuable addition to every writer's library!

There are a number of books on this subject; and I own a fair few of them. This particular item, has put an end to buying books on how to write. It is excellent. All of the others are by the "how to" writers. This, I believe is the only one; by a "why" writer.
Why we do, and don't do things, pertaining to writing. The author taps the pulse that will enable you to write...if you follow her lead. And that is demonstrated, via the curious and excellent exercises listed.
This book cannot be spoken of highly enough, for effectiveness and originality. You will also discover much about yourself and various motivations you possess.
It puts a full length mirror up to the aspiring writer, and asks "So you want to be a writer?...well if you do; you better get real". Aaannnd...Dorothea doesn't go on and on and on.....!
Clear, written well, brief and to the point.
Best of the lot by a country mile!

I am not a professional writer, however, I am learning to write ebooks and wanted guidance on getting into the the mindset of being a writer. This book did the job for me. Although written in 1934, the advice is well ahead of its time.

I was procrastinating about writing an ebook for weeks and took the authors advice to start writing as soon as I get up from bed in the morning and write whatever comes to my mind.In other words, let the sub concious come forth with ideas and information. Within 3 days I had completed a draft version of my ebook.

If you want an easy to follow book on becomming a writer, I would recommend this to anyone.

Long before Julia Cameron gave budding artists a creative kickstart with "The Artist's Way", Dorothea Brande was coaxing aspiring writers out of self-imposed dry spells, first with her creative writing classes and finally with "Becoming A Writer", which is a Cliff Notes version of the practical lessons she presented to one roomful of disillusioned students after another during the 1920s.

"Becoming a Writer" was originally published in 1934. Long before introspection became the norm in our society, Ms. Brande addressed the fears and frustrations that prevent writers from maximizing their true potential. She proposed a series of exercises to get one's creative mechanisms in gear and make the act of writing so automatic that self-censorship loses its hold. She scorned the adage that where writing was concerned, "true genius can't be taught", elevating the hopes of her students and the hackles of the existing literary community, which (figuratively) shot interlopers on sight. By encouraging the use of daily writing, regular exercise, and heavy doses of reading as the means of unlocking creative power, Ms Brande probably saved many new authors from seeking inspiration in a bottle of bathtub gin.

It's a small book, and the content is sparse compared to the huge volumes that occupy the shelves in the Writers and Writing sections of bookstores, but in the case of "Becoming A Writer", a little says a lot.

Excellent book for all beginning writers and is just as useful for those who have been writing for a while. Mrs Brande attacks the subject in a witty and encouraging way so that one's enthusiasm is fired up once again. Well worth having on your book shelf.

I found this book interesting as it brought me into a world that existed for a young girl in 1925. It's well written and not too taxing. If one is interested in how to write about themselves it's a great tool. (Although it doesn't give directions, it shows by example).

I was assigned this book twice in college, when it first came out, and I still don't know why. It's a very nice memoir of growing up in the south, but there's little that has to do with actual writing. The same can be said for a documentary I saw of the same title - Welty is a very intelligent and charming lady, and the book and documentary tell a good deal about her early life, but that's about it.

If you wish to learn how someone actually became a writer, and all the challenges of living such a life, you'd be much more rewarded by Somerset Maugham's "The Summing Up," Louis L'Amour's "Autobiography of a Wandering Man," the letters of Keats, Irving Stone's biography of Jack London, and "Women Writers at Work," in which there's a twenty-two page interview with Welty. (In fact, you can find it in the Interview archives of the Paris Review website.)

So again, nothing against the author or this book as a memoir, and if you love her stories, then definitely go for it, but if you're thinking of assigning it for a writing class, or simply looking to see how someone became a writer, there are better books to learn from.

"Listening," "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice," Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography "One Writer's Beginnings." And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty's compact memoir 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 her manifold unforgettable literary creations. 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." Not surprisingly, her photography was published in several collections which have found much acclaim in their own right.

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).

An approach that Welty herself developed early on was to consider the publication of her short stories in periodicals merely a step towards each story's final shape, and she generally revised her stories before including them in their various collections. -- Not only a keen observer, she 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.

Yet, "[t]here 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 very story, and the creative process itself: nothing that can be "mapped and plotted" but a product taking shape within the process of its creation as such, thus giving each story a unique identity of its own. And considering her reluctance to comment on, or to explain her own fiction writing, the insights into that creative process's origins she allowed her readers in "One Writer's Beginnings" are all the more to be treasured.

For someone like myself, who is fascinated by the writing process, there is no book I value more than this book by Eudora Welty. The book, beautifully illustrated with family photographs, consists of three lectures delivered by Miss Welty at Harvard University in April 1983. A paragraph written by Miss Welty and inserted at the beginning of the book, in my view, perfectly illustrates the eloquence and subtleties of biography:

"When I was young enough to still spend a long time buttoning my shoes in the morning, I'd listen toward the hall: Daddy upstairs was shaving in the bathroom and Mother downstairs was frying the bacon. They would begin whistling back and forth to each other up and down the stairwell. My father would whistle his phrase, my mother would try to whistle, then hum hers back. It was their duet. I drew my buttonhook in and out and listened to it - I knew it was 'The Merry Widow.' The difference was, their song almost floated with laughter: how different from the record, which growled from the beginning, as if the Victrola were only slowly being wound up. They kept it running between them, up and down the stairs where I was now just about ready to run clattering down and show them my shoes."

One Writer's Beginnings is divided into three sections, representing the three individual lectures: Listening, Learning to See, and Finding a Voice. As I read "Listening," I felt another good title for it would be "Observing." Miss Welty knows her two parents as, I believe, few children know their parents. Her acute powers of observation--the differences and similarities between these two important people in her life, their separate tastes and talents, the daily habits of their household--are insightful and fascinating to read. This section makes clear how reading and being read to were as regular a ritual in her life as eating three meals a day. I love her observation that "It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass." The author's observations about her life and the people around her are both sensitive and incisive. I quickly realized her reason for calling this chapter "Listening." She does not merely take in the literal content of words. Since childhood, apparently, she heard the cadences of words and the less obvious message of their inner meanings. This has been a particularly helpful revelation for me. With my strict German background, I tend to respond literally to what I hear and see, to what I read and write. Even journalism today does not limit itself to mere reporting, and I gained enormously from reading Miss Welty describe this aspect of her writing. What she does so well is to convey her own feelings inherent in words rather than merely their factual content. In short, she trusts what she hears, she trusts her inner voice that listens... and this is the source of all her writing.

Thus, it is not surprising to learn that Miss Welty was unable to feel comfortable with organized religion, that her reverence for the holiness and mystery of life was found in the great churches she visited and her contemplation of the King James Version of the Bible with its beginning offering: "In the beginning was the Word."

In the section "Learning to See," Miss Welty describes her love of traveling--road trips in the car for shopping sprees, to visit grandparents. She writes of how Ohio (where her father grew up) had her father "around the heart" as her mother adored West Virginia from whence she came...before her parents settled in Jackson, Mississippi, where Miss Welty lived her entire life. She observes and gives examples illustrating that her father, the optimist, was the one prepared for the worst, and her mother, the pessimist, was the daredevil. How many children see their parents that clearly? In this chapter, we learn a bit about the personalities of Miss Welty's grandparents. Her observations are replete with her love of them...not merely factual recountings of their backgrounds.

Perhaps it is here that another of Miss Welty's distinctions lies--her love of the people about whom she writes. Her love and respect for them is as plain between the lines as it is in the words she uses to define herself and her family in this revealing biography. My heart opens as I read her memories on the page, so filled with love are they.

It is clear I love every page of this small book, but I confess that my favorite chapter is the last one--"Finding a Voice." I love it best perhaps because it tells of one particular rail trip Miss Welty took with her father and reveals how the support for her becoming a writer came from her mother. She shares her feelings about her college experience, her discovery of poetry, and a host of helpful comments to do with her writing. I love that she writes: "I was always my own teacher." She shares her belief that a writer should remain "invisble," not "effaced" but invisible. A good example of this is her description of a soldier who had unexpectedly stepped off a halted train and was walking across a field into the distance. Rather than describe what she felt in watching him disappear, Miss Welty writes from the soldier's point of view: "...I felt us going out of sight for him, diminishing and soon to be forgotten." Another helpful reminder for me was her discovery that "...all begins with the particular, never the general."

There is too much of value in this book for any review to convey it adequately. However, I cannot end before quoting her last brief paragraph: "...I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."

There could be no better ending to this treasure of a book.

by Duffie Bart
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

This is an outstanding memoir. In telling of her own development as a writer Welty devotes much time to telling the story of her parents, and their families. She writes of them with respect, understanding and appreciation. She also by telling the story of the families gives a picture of the American world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
While Welty does not devote most of her pages to describing her authorial practice she does provide insightful passages into her overall development. Here is a key one

" But it was not until I began to write, as I seriously did only when I reached my twenties, that I found the world out there revealing, because ( as with my father now)memory had become attached to seeing , love had added itself to discovery and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going , the need I carried inside myself to know- the apprehension first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world ; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way of becoming part of it."

Welty in the opening section of the work tells how she learned to listen not simply to, but for the stories which she would make literature out of. In the second section she speaks of 'Learning to See' .and the third is devoted to 'Finding a Voice'.
Again I was impressed by her ability to write even of minor characters in her life with perception and sympathy.
A fine work.

If you think, after reading one of Eudora Welty's short stories, that you have a pretty good idea of what that story is about, I would urge you to read it at least a second time before committing to your opinion about it. After reading each of the first three stories I read from this collection, it was pretty clear that I had struck upon a brilliant writer, but it was only after re-reading each of them, that I began to realize just how brilliant a writer she was. "Why I Live at the P.O." is a first person account of a woman known only as Sister, who rants for eleven pages about her family's mistreatment of her. You'll get caught up in the swirl of energy Welty creates, but it may take a second reading to get at the story beneath the story. The same is true for "A Memory," a five-page retrospective narrative with a dreamy and sweet veneer. Just below the skin of the story, though, is another, less sweet story. In her own words, when Welty writes, she tries to "enter into the mind, heart, and skin" of her characters. In "Where is the Voice Coming From," Welty gets inside the body of the killer of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader. When she learned about his murder, she immediately felt, "with overwhelming directness: Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place." She continues, "...about that character's point of view, I felt, through my shock and revolt, I could make no mistake." If you're interested in great short fiction and the craft beneath it, don't neglect Eudora Welty.

Eudora Welty is certainly a master of the short story form and not because she defines it. Rather, she questions it with stories that work wonderfully without plot devices, structure, "political statements," and sometimes, even, reality.

Through such wonderful stories as, "Why I live at the P.O., The Whistle, The Wide Net, A Still Moment, Livvia, Shower of Gold, Ladies in Spring, and Circe," she illuminates common moments which shed light on the way we think and live.

You will run out of highlighter ink reading this one, because there are so many passages you will surely want to reread and savor later.

This grand matriarch of Southern Writer Tradition was first discovered, praised and published by luminaries such as Robert Penn Warren when he was coeditor of The Southern Review, Edward Weeks when he was editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and Mary Louise Aswell, when she was fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar.

This collection of stories is truly worthy to be called a classic. It is sometimes tedious reading, because the stories and characters are complex. After a number of false starts over a period of years, I finally resolved to give this scholarly work the focused time and attention it deserves, and feel richly rewarded for the effort.

Ms. Welty joins the ranks of great writers who prove to us that a great writer does not have to live the experience to effectively write about it. She leaps with ease between characters as diverse as Aaron Burr, a deaf black servant boy, a traveling salesmen, eccentric Southern matrons, and countless others. She portrays them in all of their complexities as if she had lived the experiences of each. Her descriptions of scenes and settings are equally as lucid and believable as if she had first hand knowledge of each. This rare and precious gift is best described in her own words, "I have been told, both in approval and accusation, that I seem to love all of my characters. 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."

This bulky collection of stories, like most which span a writer's life, have patches of unevenness throughout (and my edition goes to 622 pages). The consistent theme of Welty's prose is that the south is definitely a world apart. There are the odd nick-names, the long shadow of racism, and the sense of defeat and enclosure of the post-Civil War South. It is an odd testament of a people and a culture; a part of America but also separated from it; this sense of being at one with the nation but also severed from it makes for interesting, although sometimes tiring, reading.

Welty's stories are ultra compact and pack in history, sociology, and art all in one. She was really an all seeing type of transcendent person. Makes one interested in the deep deep South and see that nothing is worthless or too base, that stupidity and lack of morality unites us all.

People love a holy fool -- Prince Myshkin, Innocent Smith, Elwood P. Dowd.

And one of the more lovable ones is Daniel Ponder, whom his niece describes as "just like your uncle, if you've got one -- only he has one weakness." Actually his weaknesses seem to be excessive friendliness and generosity -- and that's what indirectly sparks off this arch, slightly madcap little murder trial.

Edna Earle runs a hotel in a small Southern town called Clay, and helps take care of her sweet, not-too-bright Uncle Dan. Dan is generous and friendly almost to a fault, which even leads his stiff-backed father to commit him to an asylum (in a "Harveyesque" twist, the dad is accidentally committed instead).

More importantly, Uncle Dan gets married -- once to an eccentric Baptist widow, and then to an ephemerally pretty teenager from a none-too-genteel background. Considering the marriage a "trial," the self-absorbed Bonnie Dee soon leaves Dan, comes back, ejects him from his own vast house. When Edna convinces Dan to cut off all money, she asks him to return -- only to be found dead the next morning.

And after the most white-trash funeral you can imagine, Bonnie Dee's nasty family immediately charges Dan with murder. Unfortunately, Dan doesn't really recognize the danger he is in. And the murder trial soon turns into a circus, with the trashy family, lightning balls, some inconveniently-placed servants, and two completely inept lawyers in the mix.

As with all of Eudora Welty's fiction, "The Ponder Heart" drips with Southern atmosphere and gentle eccentricities. Instead of the typical cliche trappings, Welty introduces us more to the attitudes and likably odd people who populate the South, ranging from outright weirdos to the slightly odd. In few other books could you find a murder trial interrupted by a couple of boys dragging a fig tree.

And since the whole book is seen through Edna's eyes, Welty spins out a story in arch, slightly exasperated prose. It spins out slowly and with many side-stories and tangents, full of conversational moments ("Oh, but he was proud of her") and vivid little descriptions ("like one of those dandelion puff-balls"). And her throwaway lines can tell you more than most writers can with a whole paragraph, such as Edna noting that Mrs. Peacock wore tennis shoes to her daughter's funeral -- which, in an instant, tells us everything we need to know about Mrs. Peacock.

But the sense of restrained absurdity really blossoms when the trial starts -- that's when Welty really brings out the satire guns. The whole thing starts to resemble a circus, with really awful lawyers, trashy in-laws, and a blind coroner who contributes exactly nothing. The whole trial becomes more and more surreal, until Uncle Dan's eccentric, generous nature clinches it.

In fact, Uncle Dan is the heart of the entire story: a lovable child-man whose naive, generous spirit is uncorrupted by the nasty intentions of those around him. He's too sweet to be irritating, and too unworldly to be easy to live with. It's easy to see why the fiercely down-to-earth Edna loves and protects the old guy, no matter what he does.

"The Ponder Heart" is a warm little story that happily dances on the borders of Southern farce, but never gets too silly. Delicious, funny and heartwarming.

If you like southern writers, if you like Eudora Welty, if you like eccentric characters, if you like a little slapstick in your novels, don't miss this one.
Uncle Daniel goes down in literary history as one of the most engaging and memorable of all characters as he 'just loves to give things away, loves to make people happy.' And, oh, the trouble he causes with his largesse!
Read it and laugh.

Eudora Welty possessed a remarkable talent for crawling into the skin of her characters--and Edna Earl Ponder is one of her most astonishing creations. Like her widely anthologized short story "Why I Live at the P.O.," Welty's short novel THE PONDER HEART is written as a monologue, giving the reader the unexpected sensation of sitting across the front porch from Edna Earl herself as she determinedly relates the story of how her eccentric Uncle Daniel unexpectedly found himself on trial for murder in their tiny Mississippi town.

THE PONDER HEART is a masterpiece of American humor. The humor of the novel is not, however, so much in the story (amusing though it is) as in the way it is told. Edna Earl has a typically Southern knack for turning a colorful phrase, and throughout her narrative she takes us on a tour of the best of Southern venacular, tossing off several memorable comments and laugh-out-loud descriptions on every page--particularly when it comes to white trash Bonnie Lee Peacock, who marries the addlepated Uncle Daniel on a trial basis. And if you're not Southern enough to completely grasp the definition of "white trash," that most Southern of perjoratives, Edna Earl will leave you in no doubt as to what precisely it means.

Welty wrote considerably deeper works than THE PONDER HEART--her stunning short stories and the Pulitizer Prize winning novel THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER come quickly to mind--but for pure-dee down home humor Edna Earl, Uncle Daniel, Bonnie Lee, and the Peacock family are hard to beat. A touching, hilarious, and extremely memorable work that you'll probably return to again and again! Strongly recommended.

"The South impresses its image on the Southern writer from the moment he is able to distinguish one sound from another," Flannery O'Connor wrote in her 1963 essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South," and Eudora Welty expressed a similar sentiment roughly 20 years later in her memoir "One Writer's Beginnings," when she wrote that ever since she had first been read to, and then started to read herself, there had never been a line that she had not *heard* as her eyes followed the words on the page, possibly out of the desire to read as a listener. And indeed, as Flannery O'Connor remarked in the above-mentioned essay, "the Southern writer's greatest tie with the South is through his ear."

While proof of the truth of these statements can be found throughout the literature written by both of these preeminent Southern novelists, Eudora Welty's novella "The Ponder Heart" is perhaps one of the most obvious examples thereof as it is actually written in the form of a monologue, addressed to an imaginary traveler who happens to find himself - by force of circumstance rather than plan - in the small town of Clay, Mississippi, somewhere off the main highway and not quite halfway between Tupelo and the Mississippi-Alabama border, in Edna Earle Ponder's Beulah Hotel; face to face with the hostess. "My Uncle Daniel's just like your uncle, if you've got one ... he loves society and he gets carried away," she immediately tells her visitor about her Uncle Daniel's "one weakness" and proceeds, without further ado, to tell her family's story; thus proving herself afflicted by that same weakness of "getting carried away," and as the reader/listener soon discovers, it is just as impossible to get a word in with her narrative as it is with Uncle Daniel Ponder.

But then, you don't even really want to interrupt her: too often she makes you smile or laugh out loud at her descriptions of family and townsfolk, too much you are getting caught up in the story, and too acute is the appearance of her observations. For no doubt, Eudora Welty was not only a keen observer of Southern society; she also mastered the transformation of her observations into the written word with a skill matched only by a select few of her fellow Southern writers. And true to Welty's reflection in her memoir - and to her desire to write as a listener, as much as she used to read as a listener - it is impossible not to actually hear Edna Earle talking to you as you turn the pages, in that unmistakable drawl which seems to roll past your ears languidly, much like the waves of the mighty Mississippi, and which smells of bourbon and magnolias.

Thus, in the space of less than 200 pages, we make the acquaintance of Grandpa Ponder, whose fortune would become Edna Earle's to watch over and Uncle Daniel's to give away, Uncle Daniel's first wife Miss Teacake Magee nee Sistrunk (who sang at her own wedding, which turned out to be bad luck because the marriage didn't hold), his second wife Bonnie Dee Peacock ("a little thing with yellow fluffy hair," white trash as trash can be, who after a couple months' marriage "on trial" declared the trial over and left town, but was later lured back to Clay, much to her own misfortune) and of course Uncle Daniel himself, a big man with a big heart and only seemingly a simple soul who constantly needs minding, first by his father (Grandpa Ponder), then by Edna Earle - but who surprises you again and again with his unexpected, only half-conscious witticisms and insights: a veritable court jester in the medieval tradition with the flair of a 20th century gentleman raised in the traditions of the old South. And the story that unfolds before your eyes and ears is as colorful as its protagonists, from Uncle Daniel's early commitment to an asylum to his trial for Bonnie Dee Peacock's murder, with an outcome as wildly unexpected as only Daniel Ponder could have caused it.

Flannery O'Connor, who likewise created many a character who could have populated the world of Eudora Welty's "The Ponder Heart," said that whenever she was asked why Southern writers in particular seemed to have a tendency to write about freaks, this was "because we are still able to recognize one." She warned, however, that outlandish as they might be, the heroes of modern Southern literature are not primarily intended to be comic but rather, prophetic figures reminding us of a long-forgotten responsibility, and she noted that *any* fiction coming out of the South was invariably liable to be called "grotesque," unless it actually was grotesque, in which case it would be called "photographic realism." ("The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.") And Eudora Welty, whose keen sense of observation in fact did find expression not only in her writing but also in a number of celebrated collections of photography, called location, in an essay written the same year as "The Ponder Heart," "the crossroads of circumstance" and "the heart's field;" intrinsically linked to the emotions and experiences described in any good piece of fiction writing. ("Place in Fiction," 1954.) In that sense, "A Ponder Heart" is a piece of Southern fiction in the best literary tradition - in addition to which, it is a pure delight to read.

This is a cute little book that's very easy to read. I found myself identifying with both the narrator, Edna Earle, and Uncle Daniel. If you're looking for a book that's easy on the brain, then this is the one for you.

This book is filled with beautiful photographs that show a profound respect for the dignity of each person photographed--rich or poor, black or white, old or young. Eudora Welty was truly a woman ahead of her time. As a current resident of Mississippi, the pictures have a special resonance.

Welty's tallent with the unspoken is clear as one turns each page. This book is as beautiful as it is haunting. I am originally from the delta, which makes these pages seem like a part of me. It is wonderful to see what Welty saw -- the folks who inspired her stories.

Most of us know Eudora Welty as a writer of Southern fiction, marked by regional dialect, mysterious characters, and absorbing stories. Ms. Welty's photography is another reflection of her sensitive, intuitive nature. She captures in images the essence of life in Mississippi just as she captured it later in her writings. The reproduction is not superlative, but one does get an adequate representation of her work and its intent. Those who know photography intimately and those with a passing interest will all find this book immensely satisfying.

This collection of photographs vibrantly brings to life a bygone era in Mississippi. As a former resident of the state Ms. Welty photographed, I found this book to be an indispensible document of a life now gone (for better and worse). The simplicity and beauty of the featured photographs move me almost as much as the author's fiction. While we do not remember Eudora Welty for her photographs, I find it hard to be disappointed with them; alas, I can only find fault with the volume's brevity. This book would be a wonderful addition to any collection.

This collection of photographs vibrantly brings to life a bygone era in Mississippi. As a former resident of the state Ms. Welty photographed, I found this book to be an indispensible document of a life now gone (for better and worse). The simplicity and beauty of the featured photographs move me almost as much as the author's fiction. While we do not remember Eudora Welty for her photographs, I find it hard to be disappointed with them. I can only find fault with the volume's brevity. This book would be a wonderful addition to any collection.

"I always wanted to put together a book to be called 'Country Churchyards,' composed of the pictures I took in cemeteries."

So explains Eudora Welty to Hunter cole in 1999, only a couple years before her death. So it seems strangely appropriate that one of this great author's last works was a photographic record of various churches, graveyards and tombstones that she saw over her long lifetime. And "Country Churchyards" only proves Welty to be as brilliant and insightful a photographer as she was a writer.

Elizabeth Spencer spins out an essay about Welty and her attraction to churchyards, the Souther attitude to graves, as well as the transience of these monuments. It's a lovely piece of prose, especially since Spencer has quite a way with words (".... a quiet spot surrounded by an iron fence, entered by an ornamental wrought-iron gate, dripping grey with Spanish moss, m may be knowing in its silence that it is not forgotten any more than it forgot...").

But the stars of this book are indisputably Welty's photographs. The first few are striking but not terribly accomplished pictures of churches, as well as a lone statue of a tiara-wearing angel with one arm held up. It looks like it's waving.

But the pictures become more striking and more polished as the book goes on, and Welty's focus shifts to the more unusual churchyards -- ornate monuments, mossy stones surrounded by willows, striking churches veiled by fences and forests, statues of women weeping and drowsing, worried-looking saints, a life-sized Jesus carrying a cross, bas-reliefs of fallen trees, sleeping babies, and wrought-iron gates.

Not to mention the angels -- lots and lots of them, and only a couple are drippy child-cherubs. More often they are beautiful strong androgynes who are pointing at the horizon and watching over the graves. And the beauty of the graveyards themselves are brought to light occasionally, such as the misty sunlit pictures of vast leafy trees, flowers and tangled grasses, with a few tombstones among them.

Everybody loves a beautiful old graveyard, and I used to live near one of the loveliest ones you can imagine, crammed between a library and a busy side-street. Despite this, the exquisite old stones and elaborate Catholic statuary gave the whole area a feeling of peace.

So it's unsurprising that Eudora Welty, who spent a lifetime sketching eloquent, bittersweet, warm stories and novels about the South she grew up in, is able to convey all that beauty and history to her readers. And her photography is no less effective than her writing -- once she overcame the initial amateurish problems, Welty was able to infuse a lot of feeling into what she photographed.

The photos are all black-and-white, and most of them have a misty sunlit feeling. And Welty successfully gives many of her photographs a wistful, poignant feeling -- especially when she focuses on the little sleeping stone babies, or a stone dog waiting patiently on its master's grave. Then again, there are graves where you wonder what the designers were thinking -- for example, what is with all the SHEEP? Were some of these people unusually attached to their woolly bovines?

Additionally, the photos are also taken from a variety of angles, which is especially important when photographing the gorgeous old churches, or special shots like the angel watching the graveyard (who is photographed from behind). Accasionally you get the feeling that somebody has wandered into the photo -- such as one man who appears on horseback near a church, and seems surprised to see Welty's camera.

"Country Churchyards" is exactly what it sounds like, but in Eudora Welty's hands it became a sweet, melancholy chronicle of where the dead lie. A sweet little photographic record.

Did I say I love this book enough? Eudora Welty, the great Mississippi writer took these photographs many years ago. They cover churches and cemeteries around the Jackson area. Some of these places I know and have in my own collection of photos. Haunting places. There is much to be said of Welty's work with the camera. She has a great eye for detail, for light, and for mood. She has captured a period that is long gone. She loves angels. There are few commentaries because this is a book, not about words, but about churches, tombstones, and their lasting message. A great addition to both collectors of tombstone art and Eudora Welty's work. A classic. Buy it while you can. It will be a collectible one day.

I obviously am coming late to this book. I've been a fan of Miss Welty's writing since growing up in the sixties. I actually wrote her a fan letter and got a reply and like a stupid child, didn't keep it.

I also own Miss Welty's other photo books. As a photo bug of forty years, I enjoyed her other work during the Depression, though it certainly was not special in itself. It is worth more as a historical record.

Upon buying this book I was surprised that it made it to publication. I have shot hundreds of the same type of photos traveling through small towns myself. These photos remain as did her earlier photographic work--snapshots of a time and a place. There's nothing wrong with snapshots, but I them for what they are: a historical record. Others have done much better work on cemeteries and gravestones.

I'm confident that, without Miss Welty's name, this book would never have reached publication.

Those who cherish Eudora Welty's earlier collection of photographs (_One Time, One Place_) need no urging from me to sample this new jewel box of images from a Mississippi past. Like the earlier collection, these black-and-white photographs document the rural South of the 1930's and 1940's when Welty worked as a photographer for the WPA. As its title suggests, this book offers a tighter focus: on the burying-places of the rich and poor, the black and the white. Here be angels of all sorts, urns and chapels, sheep and dogs, children who seem but to sleep in masks of marble. Those who know Welty's keen gift for description will see how her eye for detail, setting and atmosphere was trained up in her early photographic work. Each image seems surrounded by the rich and generous spirit through which Welty sees the world and those who toil in it.

The photographs are preceded by an account of a conversation with Miss Welty (as we Southern men and women of letters have learned to always refer to her) and interspersed with excerpts from the novels. Also a joy is the introduction by fellow Mississipian Elizabeth Spencer, who places these images in the landscape of Welty's fiction, as expressions of "Eudora Welty's vision of death as a part of life." Spencer continues, "It must find its ceremony within family and community, and its symbols, beautifully displayed here, arise out of the beliefs and feelings of shared love."

To spend time with this book is to walk among the mossy trees, rest among the cool white monuments, and feel the pull of that greater community which surrounds us. It gives further evidence why Miss Welty is one of our great national treasures. But I leave the last word to her, in this excerpt from _The Optimist's Daughter_: "The top of the hill ahead was crowded with winged angels and life-sized effigies of bygone citizens in old-fashioned dress, standing as if by count among the columns and shafts and conifers like a familiar set of passengers collected on deck of a ship, on which they all knew each other -- bona-fide members of a small local excursion, embarked on a voyage that is always returning in dreams."

Eudora Welty had a long and distinguished writing career. Her stories are set in the small southern towns that she knows so well, and she is known for her character portrayal. This book, which is my first experience with her work, is no exception. The stories are short and full of meaning. Some are simple and some border on the horrific. But all of them leave a lasting impression, causing me to ponder their meaning. The characters are well developed. There is no doubt that Ms. Welty is a master of her craft.

It's true that the people come alive right off the pages. Only problem is that I just didn't like any of them. Each story presents some sort of a puzzle. She packs them with great imagery and wonderful details. I found myself getting involved in reading them. And then, when the story ended, there was a lingering question. What had happened? I was always left with an uncomfortable feeling. And left wondering.

I am sure that this ambiguity was the writer's intention. And I do applaud her skill. I'm glad I had the experience of reading her work. I just don't want to read any more of it.

In her first book, Eudora Welty surpassed the mannered and overreaching efforts of more celebrated Southern authors. She examined the inner lives of varied characters -- male and female, black and white, funny and brutal -- and submitted them all to her quiet and curious personality. The effect is both timeless and strange.

This was the first Eudora Welty book I've read. Because this is my freshman year in college, I'm wondering why it took me so long.
Like her senior, Southern cohort Faulkner, Welty concentrates her gentle touch on characters in and around Mississippi. Every story is remarkable in its own way, but there are a few standouts. "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" is an amusing tale of a dim-witted girl who's on the brink of marriage, is snatched away, and then thrown right back when her beau comes calling. The Hitch Hikers is a brooding story of a murder in a traveling salesman's car. My favorite is The Key, in which a filched key gives doubtful, deaf newlyweds new reason for hope of love and contentment.
Miss Welty puts an incredible amount of feeling into her stories, but is not afraid to allow the charming or even picayune to provide distraction from the gravity surrounding. This collection encapsulates the famous Death of a Traveling Salesman. Lovely.

"The Golden Apples" is one of the five best short story collections I've read. Welty's description of character, and its transformation throughout life (it's almost like an episodic novel) is subtle, humorous, and moving. Her style is poetic yet lucid, perfect for the emotionally complex situations she describes. The citizens of Morgana, Mississippi, with all their virtues, flaws and perversities, reminded me of Anderson's "Winesberg, Ohio." But Welty's eye seems defter, deeper, less given to easy pay-off and caricature. Similarly, she is superior to Flannary O'Connor because her tales deal with the nuances of everyday events rather than thunder-and-lightning epiphanies.

Dive into this swirling, invigorating pool and have your views of people and the world changed, as were mine.

In The Golden Apples, Welty offers a cycle of subtle, complex and often hilarious stories/myths from the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. Told from a variety of perspectives and voices, the cycle uses southern imagery, greek mythology (sometimes via the poetry of Yeats) and musings on art and music to narrate the history of a cast of characters either absorbed by or isolated from Morgana and the surrounding world. The reader, in assembling meaning from the flood of rich narrative becomes more than a casual observer, but a participant in the ongoing mythology of Morgana.

Like Winesberg or Yoknapatawpha or even Middle Earth, Welty creates a world so complete and convincing that we can't help but immerse ourselves. And what lies in the gaps between the stories and known chronology becomes just as captivating as the story we're given.

Golden Apples, in its complexity, can be a lot of work. But the payoff is huge.

Golden Apples is a novel by Eudora Welty that reads like a series of bizarre short stories with the same recurring characters set in a fictional town in Mississippi. Some readers may find it difficult because of its use of language (...). Others may find it difficult just for it's odd prose. The chapters are not linear nor are obvious segues ever used to cue the reader in that a jump in time has taken place. There are also lots of characters with similar names making it easy to lose track of who has done what, when. If I were more drawn into the book I'd want to reread it to get the pieces I missed or misunderstood but frankly I'm just not captivated enough to want to do that right now.