
Eudora Alice Welty was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia Business School. While at Columbia University, where she was the captain of the women's polo team, Welty was a regular at Romany Marie's café in 1930. During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs. Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the legendary and oft-anthologized stories "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man," and "A Worn Path." Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story, and was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, where, despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of her hometown. Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson. Excerpted and adopted from Wikipedia.
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.
With a preface written by the author especially for this edition, this is the complete collection of stories by Eudora Welty. Including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The 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).A curtain of green and other stories.Lily Daw and the three ladies --A piece of news --Petrified man --The key --Keela, the outcast Indian maiden --Why I live at the P.O. --The whistle --The hitch-hikers --A memory --Clytie --Old Mr. Marblehall --Flowers for Marjorie --A curtain of green --A visit of charity --Death of a traveling salesman --Powerhouse --A worn path --The wide net and other stories.First love --The wide net --A still moment --Asphodel --The winds --The purple hat --Livvie --At the landing --The golden apples.Shower of gold --June recital --Sir Rabbit --Moon Lake --The whole world knows --Music from Spain --The wanderers --The bride of the Innisfallen and other stories.No place for you, my love --The burning --The bride of the Innisfallen --Ladies in spring --Circe --Kin --Going to Naples --Uncollected stories.Where is the voice coming from? --The demonstrators.
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 loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.
Set on the Mississippi Delta in 1923, this story captures the mind and manners of the Fairchilds, a large aristocratic family, self-contained and elusive as the wind. The vagaries of the Fairchilds are keenly observed, and sometimes harshly judged, by nine-year-old Laura McRaven, a Fairchild cousin who takes The Yellow Dog train to the Delta for Dabney Fairchild's wedding. An only child whose mother has just died, Laura is resentful of her boisterous, careless cousins, and desperate for their acceptance. As the hour moves closer and closer to wedding day, Laura arrives at a more subtle understanding of both the Fairchilds and herself. Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty is one of the South's finest novelists. She won a Pulitzer in 1972 for The Optimist's Daughter. Delta Wedding is her best known work.
Uncle Daniel Ponder, whose fortune is exceeded only by his desire to give it away, is a source of vexation for his niece, Edna Earle. Uncle Daniel’s trial for the alleged murder of his seventeen-year-old bride is a comic masterpiece. Awarded the William Dean Howells Medal of the american Academy of Arts and Letters. Drawings by Joe Krush.
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)
In her now-famous introduction to this first collection by a then-unknown young writer from Mississippi named Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter wrote that "there is even in the smallest story a sense of power in reserve which makes me believe firmly that, splendid beginning that it is, it is only the beginning." Porter was of course prophetic, and the beginning was splendid. A Curtain of Green both introduced and established Eudora Welty as in instinctive genius of short fiction, and in this groundbreaking collection, which includes "Powerhouse" and "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden," are the first great works of a great American writer.
Phoenix Jackson, an old woman, is on a dangerous journey through the woods to get medicine for her grandson.The Atlantic Monthly first published the story in February 1941.
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).
Contains:· Why I Live At The P.O. [1941] · Death Of A Traveling Salesman [1941] · Shower Of Gold [1941] · Where Is The Voice Coming From? [1963] ____Eudora Welty is one of America's most distinguished writers. Her reputation rests largely on her skill and delicacy in portraying a wide range of characters, rich and poor, black and white. Her style is marked by her perception of the Southern character, her ear for colloquial speech and her ability to endow her portraits of small-town life with a universal significance. Included are four stories that capture the heart of the American South.
Thirteen outstanding short stories by Welty, written between 1937 and 1951. “Miss Welty has written some of the finest short stories of modern times” (Orville Prescott, New York Times). Selected and with an Introduction by Ruth M. Vande Kieft.
Eudora Welty was one of the twentieth century's greatest literary figures. For as long as students have been studying her fiction as literature, writers have been looking to her to answer the profound questions of what makes a story good, a novel successful, a writer an artist. On Writing presents the answers in seven concise chapters discussing the subjects most important to the narrative craft, and which every fiction writer should know, such as place, voice, memory, and language. But even more important is what Welty calls “the mystery” of fiction writing—how the writer assembles language and ideas to create a work of art.Originally part of her larger work The Eye of the Story but never before published in a stand-alone volume, On Writing is a handbook every fiction writer, whether novice or master, should keep within arm's reach. Like The Elements of Style, On Writing is concise and fundamental, authoritative and timeless—as was Eudora Welty herself.
On the hot, dry first Sunday of August, three generations of Granny Vaughn’s descendants gather at her home in the little town of Banner, Mississippi, to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. The celebrations take only two days, but many members of the family are great storytellers, and when they get together, the temptation is irresistible—a device that enables Eudora Welty to take the reader back into the lost battles of the past, capturing different tones of voice and ways of thinking.
"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" (1949) is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. It was Welty's favorite among her books. The stories of "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" (1955) are set both in the 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 of her youth that is essential to her work and cogent discussions of literary form.
These eight stories reveal the singular imaginative power of one of America's most admired writers. Set in the Old Natchez Trace region, the stories dip in and out of history and range from virgin wilderness to a bar in New Orleans. In each story, Miss Welty sustains the high level of performance that, throughout her distinguished career, has won her numerous literary awards. "Miss Welty runs a photofinish with the finest prose artists of her time" (Time).
by Eudora Welty
Rating: 4.2 ⭐
This two-volume collection reveals the singular imaginative power of one of America's most admired Southern writers. "Complete Novels" gathers all of Welty's longer fiction, from "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942) to her Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Optimist's Daughter" (1972).
by Eudora Welty
Rating: 3.9 ⭐
In 1956, Caedmon had the great fortune to record Eudora Welty reading some of her finest stories. In her sweetly vibrant Mississippi drawl, Ms. Welty deftly draws the listener in to the uproariously multilayered "Why I Live at the P.O.," the spontaneous "Powerhouse" and the insightful voice of women's truths in "Petrified Man." Ms. Welty's reading brings immediacy and resonance to these wonderful tales.
by Eudora Welty
Rating: 3.9 ⭐
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.
The Library of America • Story of the WeekIn a Mississippi beauty parlor, a beautician and her customer discuss husbands, boarders from out of town, and the strange inhabitants of a traveling circus sideshow.Reprinted from Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, & Memoir (The Library of America, 1992), pages 22–36.First published in the Southern Review (Spring 1939) and collected in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941). Copyright © 1939 by Eudora Welty; copyright renewed © 1967. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for Eudora Welty LLC.
"Γεμάτα με τους ρυθμούς και τους ιδιωματισμούς του Νότου, τα διηγήματά της αποτελούν ένα πλούσιο δώρο στους κατοίκους του, συλλαμβάνοντας με έξοχο τρόπο τον τόνο της φευγαλέας στιγμής και αποκαλύπτοντας το αναπάντεχο φορτίο της." (Lettie Ransley, The Guardian)"Η ειρωνική τρυφερότητα του Τσέχοφ, το οξύ πνεύμα του Μωπασσάν, η παντογνωσία του Πόε, η λεπτή δύναμη του Χένρυ Γκριν. Είναι η τελειότερη στυλίστρια σε ύφος Μότσαρτ που γράφει στην αγγλική γλώσσα στον αιώνα μας." (Mary Lee Settle, Saturday Review)"Ο πλούτος ενός τέτοιου ταλέντου είναι δύσκολο να συνοψιστεί... Είναι πάντα έντιμη, πάντα δίκαιη. Και απείρως διασκεδαστική. Υπέροχα διηγήματα". (Maureen Howard, New York Times Book Review)"Διηγήματα το ίδιο καλά από μόνα τους όσο και στην επιρροή που ασκούν στις φιλοδοξίες άλλων από την εποχή του Χέμινγουευ... Το εύρος της προσφοράς της Γουέλτυ είναι τελικά πιο ορατό όχι στην ποικιλία των τύπων -φάρσα, σάτιρα, τρόμος, λυρισμός, βουκολικό μυστήριο- αλλά στη σαφήνεια και τη στιβαρότητα και την απόλυτη εντιμότητα ενός δια βίου οράματος." (Reynolds Price, New Republic)Περιλαμβάνει τα διηγήματα:- "Η σφυρίχτρα", "Μια είδηση", "Ο θάνατος του πλασιέ" και "Πολυπερπατημένο μονοπάτι" από τη συλλογή A curtain of green,- "Λίβι" και "Το μωβ καπέλο" από τη συλλογή The wide net and other stories,- "Χρυσή βροχή" από τη συλλογή The golden apples,- "Δεν υπάρχει χώρος για σένα, αγάπη μου" και "Η νύφη του Ιννισφέλλεν" από τη συλλογή The bride of Innisfallen και- "Από που έρχεται η φωνή;" από τη συλλογή Uncollected stories).
Much like her highly acclaimed One Writer's Beginnings, The Eye of the Story offers Eudora Welty's invaluable meditations on the art of writing. In addition to seven essays on craft, this collection brings together her penetrating and instructive commentaries on a wide variety of individual writers, including Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.
'"Watch out for the mosquitoes," they called to one another, lyrically because warning wasn't any use anyway, as they walked out of their kimonos and dropped them like the petals of one big scattered flower on the bank behind them, and exposing themselves felt in a hundred places at once the little pangs.'Moon Lake is the story of a summer camp in Mississippi, a surly lifeguard, a rebellious orphan girl, and the fateful day when they learn the secrets of life and death. Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty's extraordinary short story is a lushly atmospheric and acutely observed portrayal of the strange, surreal time between childhood and adulthood.
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).
When Arturo the Parrot, whose job it was to help greet people as they came into The Friendly Shoe Store, picked up and repeated a small boy's disgruntled comment, “Shoes are for the birds!,” it certainly changed the course of his life. This is Eudora Welty's only book specifically written for young readers.
Eudora Welty is among the very few authors who are acclaimed for their work in both literature and photography. In 1971 she surprised her readers with this important book, for in One Time, One Place many of them discerned for the first time that this revered writer was also a gifted photographer. Throughout her writing career, Welty's camera was a close companion. The one hundred pictures included here are her selections from many she took during the Great Depression as she traveled in her home state of Mississippi. These pictures are poignant images of human endurance. For her, looking back, they showed a record of a time and a place, an impoverished world that against great odds sustained a sense of community. Both black and white, the men, women, and children she photographed, unaware that they are coping with dire conditions, press onward with their lives. “The Depression, in fact,” Welty says in her introduction, “was not a noticeable phenomenon in the poorest state in the Union.”In the foreword to this Silver Anniversary edition of One Time, One Place , William Maxwell, Eudora Welty's dear friend and esteemed colleague in literature, offers an appreciation of this photographer's special genius and a loving glimpse into her artistic world.
For many years Eudora Welty wished to produce a book about country churchyards. Published at long last in her ninety-first year, this book includes ninety of her photographs along with a conversation in which Welty shares her impressions and her memories of the 1930s and 1940s when she rambled through Mississippi cemeteries taking pictures. She recalls poignant and sometimes chilling experiences that occurred.“I took a lot of cemetery pictures in my life,” she said. “For me cemeteries had a sinister appeal somehow.” Her camera eye focused on distinctive funerary emblems, statuary, storied urns, and appealing folklife qualities expressed in the gravestones. Just as many pieces of Welty's fiction feature lyrical descriptions of cemeteries and graves in a way that is expressly Weltian, so too do these photographs taken in the cool, sequestered churchyards and graveyards of Jackson, Port Gibson, Churchill, Rodney, Utica, Crystal Springs, Vicksburg, Rocky Springs, and sites near the old Natchez Trace.They not only document her rambles but also accent the images of regional cemeteries that appear in her stories and novels. This is her unique view of the southern graveyard and of its unusual artworks that arrested her attention―chains, willows, baskets, angels, lambs, pointing hands, doves, and wreaths. “I like the tombstones showing children asleep in seashells,” she says. For her, an absorbed observer, there is charm in the stone motifs and in the sentimental modes of commemorating the dead.As a contemplative loner she called no attention to herself as she wandered quietly through small-town cemeteries with her camera. Both the country settings and the heartfelt inscriptions on decaying marble heightened her imagination and triggered her creative impulses.Accompanying the photographs are selected passages about graveyards and funerals from her fiction― Losing Battles , The Golden Apples and Other Stories , A Curtain of Green and Other Stories , and T he Optimist's Daughter― and from her essay “Some Notes on River Country.”In the introduction Elizabeth Spencer, a Mississippi writer who has been a lifelong friend of Welty's, explores the photographic images for the meanings they yield, for the light they throw onto Welty's fiction, and for her own memories of their home state's evocative graveyards and burial customs.
Eudora Welty, one of America's great storytellers, relates, in her sweetly vibrant Mississippi drawl, five of her finest stories. from the uproariously irreverent Why I Live at the P.O. and the quieter, richly perceptive A Memory and A Worn Path to sponteneous Powerhouse and the insightful voice of women's truth's in Petrified Man, Welty opens up her stories and invites the listener in.Description: 2 sound cassettes (1 hr., 38 min.) : analog, Dolby processed.
Set in 1923, Delta Wedding is an exquisitely woven story of southern family life, centered around the Fairchild family’s preparations for a wedding at their Mississippi plantation. In The Ponder Heart, a comic masterpiece, Miss Edna Earle Ponder, one of the few living members of a once prominent family, tells a traveling salesman the history of her family and fellow townsfolk. This edition brings together two fine works from one of the most beloved writers of the American south.