Eudora Welty

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author sketches her early life and discusses growing up in the South.

One Writer's Beginnings

“It is easy to praise Eudora Welty,” as Robert Penn Warren has written, “but it is not so easy to analyze the elements in her work that make it so easy—and such a deep plea-sure—to praise. To say that may, indeed, be the highest praise, for it implies that the work, at its best, is so fully created, so deeply realized, and formed with such apparent in-nocence that it offers only itself, in shining unity.” The Optimist’s Daughter is Miss Welty’s work at its best, and reconfirms Mr. Warren’s general tribute, including the difficulty of analysis: Laurel Hand, long absent from the South, comes from Chicago to New Orleans, where her father dies after surgery. With Fay, the stupid new young wife of her father, Laurel returns to her former Mississippi home and stays a few days after the funeral for reunions with old friends. In a night alone in the house she grew up in, she confronts elements of the past and comes to a better understanding of it and of herself and her parents. The simplicity of the story belies its universal implications. This is a story of “the great interrelated family of those who never know the meaning of what happened to them.” With unsurpassed artistry Miss Welty shows us Laurel’s struggle to come to terms with her father’s death and with the life of the small Mississippi town he was so intimately involved with. In trying to deal with people who, like Fay, never even care to un-derstand what has happened to them, Laurel realizes that she too has kept her distance from a shared past. Like so many today, Laurel has lived in a city where she survives by avoiding any real involvement with those around her. It is only the shock of her father’s death that leads her to new insights into the relationship between love and death and memory. Certainly this book will be a rewarding experience to readers of Miss Welty’s earlier work. Newcomers will discover its many dimensions and great substance: the large cast of characters and the complexity of their relationships, the rich humor and subtlety of dialogue that reveals without describing, the wideness of scope compressed within the boundaries of a short novel, the wisdom and discernment that underlie the author’s vision of human life.

The Optimist's Daughter

Snowdie MacLain's husband returns from the dead to surprise the inhabitants of Morgana, Mississippi.

The Golden Apples

All forty-one stories published by the distinguished writer are brought together, displaying her insights into the American South and including her most famous work, "Death of a Traveling Salesman"

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

A Curtain of Green and Other Stories

This surrealistic tale about a Mississippi planter's family and their encounters with assorted bandits and Indians recaptures the innocence, energy, and easy carelessness of our lost frontier

The Robber Bridegroom

Eudora Welty discusses her own artistic endeavors and aims as well as providing commentaries on such writers as Chekhov, Faulkner, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen

Selected Essays and Reviews

The Eye of the Story

Ronald A. Sharp

Stories, legends, poems, essays, letters, and memoirs, by Aesop, Yeats, Homer, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and others, offer a commentary on friendship

The Norton Book of Friendship

The author shares her thoughts on the art of fiction writing that discusses such key elements of the narrative craft as language, memory, place, and voice, as well the techniques and tools every writer needs to know.

On Writing

An elderly black woman who lives out in the country makes the long and arduous journey into town, as she has done many times in the past.

A Worn Path

Why I Live at the P.P. and Other Stories

Eudora Welty's subjects are the people who live in southern towns like Jackson, Mississippi, which has been her home for all of her long life. I've stayed in one place, ' she says, and 'it's become the source of the information that stirs my imagination.' Her distinctive voice and wry observations are rooted in the southern conversational tradition. The stories in this volume, from the first two collections she published, range in tone from the quietly understated and psychologically subtle to the outrageously grotesque. Linking them all is Welty's remarkable ear for the language and point of view of the South. 'She's a lot smarter than her cousins in Beula, ' someone remarks about a reputed suicide in one story. 'Especially Edna Earle, that never did get to be what you'd call a heavy thinker. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the 'c' got through the 'I' in a Coca-Cola sign." The stories in this volume, from the first two collections she published, range in tone from the quietly understated and psychologically subtle to the outrageously grotesque.

Containing All of A Curtain of Green and Other Stories and The Wide Net and Other Stories

Selected Stories of Eudora Welty

The Petrified Man

Collects photographs of Mississippians that Welty took in the 1930s when she worked for the Works Progress Administration

Mississippi in the Depression : a Snapshot Album

One Time, One Place

When this title first appeared on November 7, 1941, it immediately established its author as a leading voice in American letters. To celebrate the release fifty years ago, HBJ offers this special 50th anniversary edition. A half-century has not dated these stories, which include "Petrified Man", "Powerhouse", "Why I Live at the P.O". and more.

And Other Stories

A Curtain of Green

Stories written over a period of twenty-five years include The Wide Net, Lily Daw and the Three Ladies, and The Bride of the Innisfallen

Thirteen Stories

Als Kind besuchte sie täglich die Leihbücherei, wo sie nicht mehr als zwei Bücher täglich entleihen durfte - viel zu wenig für ihren Lesehunger! Doch sie liest nicht nur wie besessen, sie ist auch eine aufmerksame Beobachterin, in der schon bald der Wunsch keimt, selbst Schriftstellerin zu werden. Wie sie von Mississippi aus erste Schritte in die Welt wagt, wie ihr das ganze Leben zur Schule des Schreibens wird, bevor sie den Mut zur eigenen Stimme findet, davon erzählt Eudora Welty auf hinreißend lebendige Weise.

Vom Wagnis, die Welt in Worte zu fassen

Place in Fiction

Primo amore e altri racconti

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.

Eudora Welty

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