Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the
American SouthThe Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
. Her novel
The Optimist's DaughterThe Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning 1972 short novel by Eudora Welty. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. He fails to recover from the surgery, though,...
won the
Pulitzer PrizeThe Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
in 1973. Welty was awarded the
Presidential Medal of FreedomThe Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...
, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the
Library of AmericaThe Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
. Her house in
JacksonJackson is the capital and the most populous city of the US state of Mississippi. It is one of two county seats of Hinds County ,. The population of the city declined from 184,256 at the 2000 census to 173,514 at the 2010 census...
,
MississippiMississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
, is a
National Historic LandmarkA National Historic Landmark is a building, site, structure, object, or district, that is officially recognized by the United States government for its historical significance...
and open to the public as a museum.
Biography
Eudora Welty was born in
Jackson, MississippiJackson is the capital and the most populous city of the US state of Mississippi. It is one of two county seats of Hinds County ,. The population of the city declined from 184,256 at the 2000 census to 173,514 at the 2010 census...
on April 13, 1909, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty (1879–1931) and Mary Chestina (Andrews) Welty (1883–1966). She grew up with younger brothers Edward Jefferson and Walter Andrews. Eudora’s mother was a schoolteacher. Eudora soon developed a love of reading, reinforced by her mother who believed that "any room in our house, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read to". Her father, who worked as an insurance executive, was intrigued by gadgets and machines and inspired in Eudora a love of all things mechanical. She later would use technology for symbolism in her stories and would also become an avid photographer, like her father.
Near the time of her high school graduation, Eudora moved with her family to a house built for them at 1119 Pinehurst Street, which would remain her permanent address until her death. Wyatt C. Hendricks designed the Welty's Tudor Revival style home, which is now known as the
Eudora Welty HouseThe Eudora Welty House in Jackson, Mississippi was the home of author Eudora Welty for nearly 80 years. It was built by her parents in 1925. In it she did all her writing, in an upstairs bedroom. Welty created the garden over decades...
.
From 1925 to 1927, Welty studied at the
Mississippi State College for WomenMississippi University for Women, also known as MUW or simply the "W" is a four-year coeducational public university located in Columbus, Mississippi. It was formerly known as Industrial Institute and College and later Mississippi State College for Women...
, then transferred to the University of Wisconsin to complete her studies in English Literature. She studied advertising at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
at the suggestion of her father. Because she graduated at the height of the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, she struggled to find work in New York. Soon after she returned to Jackson in 1931, her father died of leukemia. She took a job at a local radio station and wrote about Jackson society for the Tennessee newspaper
Commercial Appeal. In 1935, she began work for the
Works Progress AdministrationThe Works Progress Administration was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unskilled workers to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads, and operated large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects...
. As a publicity agent, she collected stories, conducted interviews, and took photographs of daily life in Mississippi. It was here that she got a chance to observe the Southern life and human relationships that she would later use in her short stories. During this time she also held meetings in her house with fellow writers and friends, a group she called the Night-Blooming Cereus Club. Three years later, she left her job to become a full time writer.
In 1936, she published "The Death of a Traveling Salesman" in the literary magazine
Manuscript, and then proceeded to publish stories in several other notable publications, including
The New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. She solidified her place as an influential Southern writer when she penned her first book of short stories,
A Curtain of Green. Her new-found success won her a seat on the staff of
The New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
book review and as well as a
Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
grant that allowed her to travel to France, England, Ireland, and Germany. While abroad, she spent some time as a resident lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1960, she returned home to Jackson once again to care for her elderly mother and two brothers.
She continued to write, and won a
Pulitzer Prize for FictionThe Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It originated as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, which was awarded between 1918 and 1947.-1910s:...
in 1973 for her novel,
The Optimist's DaughterThe Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning 1972 short novel by Eudora Welty. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. He fails to recover from the surgery, though,...
. She also published a collection of photographs depicting the Great Depression titled "One Time, One Place" in 1971. She then lectured at
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and eventually turned the speeches into a three-part book entitled
One Writer's Beginnings. She continued to live in her family house in Jackson until her death on July 23, 2001.
Photography
While Welty worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, she took photographs of people from all economic and social classes in her spare time. Collections of her photographs were published as
One Time, One Place (1971) and
Photographs (1989). Her photography was the basis for several of her short stories, including "Why I Live at the PO", which was inspired by a woman she photographed ironing in the back of a small post office. Although focused on her writing, Welty continued to take photographs until the 1950s.
Writing career and major works
Welty's first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman", was published in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of author
Katherine Anne PorterKatherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...
, who became a mentor to Welty and wrote the foreword to Welty's first short story collection,
A Curtain of GreenA Curtain of Green was the first collection of short stories written by Eudora Welty. In these stories Welty looks at the state of Mississippi through the eyes of its inhabitants, the common people, both black and white, and presents a realistic view of the racial relations that existed at the time...
, in 1941. The book established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the stories "Why I Live at the P.O.", "Petrified Man", and the frequently anthologized
A Worn Path. Excited by the printing of Welty's works in publications such as
The Atlantic Monthly, the
Junior LeagueThe Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. is a non-profit organization of 292 Junior Leagues in Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom and the United States. Junior Leagues are educational and charitable women's organizations aimed at improving their communities through volunteerism and...
of Jackson, of which Welty was a member, requested permission from the publishers to reprint some of her works. She eventually published over forty short stories, five novels, three works of nonfiction, and one children's book.
The short story "Why I Live at the P.O." was published with two others in 1941 by
The Atlantic Monthly. It was republished later that year in Welty's first collection of short stories,
A Curtain of Green. The story is about Sister, and how she ends up living at the P.O. as a result of her aggravating family. Seen by critics as quality Southern literature, the story comically captures family relationships. Like most of her short stories, Welty masterfully captures Southern idiom and places importance on location and customs. "A Worn Path" was also published in
The Atlantic Monthly and
A Curtain of Green. It is seen as one of Welty's finest short stories, winning the second place
O. Henry AwardThe O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....
in 1941.
Welty's debut novel,
The Robber Bridegroom (1942), deviated from her previous psychologically-inclined works, presenting static, fairy-tale characters. Some critics suggest that she worried about "encroaching on the turf of the male literary giant to the north of her in Oxford, Mississippi-William Faulkner", and therefore wrote in a fairy-tale style instead of a historical one. Most critics and readers saw it as a modern Southern fairy-tale and noted that it employs themes and characters reminiscent of the
Grimm BrothersThe Brothers Grimm , Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm , were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular...
' works.
Immediately after the murder of
Medgar EversMedgar Wiley Evers was an African American civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi...
in 1963, Welty wrote
Where Is the Voice Coming From?. As Welty later said, she wondered, "Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story—my fiction—in the first person: about that character's point of view". Welty's story was published in
The New Yorker soon after de la Beckwith's arrest.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,
The Optimist's DaughterThe Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning 1972 short novel by Eudora Welty. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. He fails to recover from the surgery, though,...
(1972) is believed by some to be Welty's best novel. It was written at a much later date than the bulk of her work. As poet Howard Moss wrote in
The New York Times, the book is "a miracle of compression, the kind of book, small in scope but profound in its implications, that rewards a lifetime of work". The plot focuses on family struggles when the daughter and the second wife of a judge confront each other in the limited confines of a hospital room while the judge undergoes eye surgery.
In 1992, Welty was awarded the
Rea Award for the Short StoryThe Rea Award for the Short Story is an annual award given to a living American or Canadian author chosen for unusually significant contributions to short story fiction.-The Award:...
for her lifetime contributions to the American short story. Welty was a charter member of the
Fellowship of Southern WritersThe Fellowship of Southern Writers is a literary organization founded in 1987 in Chattanooga, Tennessee by 21 Southern writers and other literary luminaries...
, founded in 1987. She also taught creative writing at colleges and in workshops. She lived near Jackson's
Belhaven CollegeBelhaven University is a private Christian liberal arts university located in Jackson, Mississippi. Founded by Dr. Lewis Fitzhugh and later donated to the now defunct Presbyterian Church in the United States, the school has been independently run by a Board of Trustees since 1972...
and was a common sight among the people of her hometown.
Literary criticism and non-fiction
Eudora Welty was a prolific writer who created stories in multiple genres. Throughout her writing are the recurring themes of the paradox of human relationships, the importance of place (a recurring theme in most Southern writing), and the importance of mythological influences that help shape the theme.
Welty's interest in the conflicting relationships between individuals and their communities, according to the writer herself, stems out of her natural abilities as an observer. Perhaps the best examples can be found within the short stories in
A Curtain of Green. "Why I Live at the P.O." comically illustrates the conflict between Sister and her immediate community, her family. This particular story uses lack of proper communication to showcase the underlying theme of the paradox of human connection. "Death of a Traveling Salesman" directly reveals the struggle for human relationships by contrasting the successful loving relationship of the young couple to the lonely, loveless salesman who dies alone. Another case in point is Miss Eckhart of The Golden Apples, who is considered an outsider in her town. Welty shows that this piano teacher’s independent lifestyle allows her to follow her passions, but also highlights Miss Eckhart's longing to start a family and to be seen by the community as someone who belongs in Morgana. As is apparent, her stories are often characterized by the struggle to retain identity while keeping community relationships.
Place is vitally important in arguably every story Welty has ever written. Welty believed that place is what makes fiction seem real, because with place comes customs, feelings, and associations. Place answers the questions, "What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?" Place is a prompt to memory; thus the human mind is what makes place significant. This is the job of the storyteller. “A Worn Path” is one short story that proves how place shapes how a story is perceived. Within the tale, the main character, Phoenix, must fight to overcome the barriers within the vividly described Southern landscape as she makes her trek to the nearest town. "The Wide Net" is another of Welty’s short stories that uses place to define mood and plot. The river in the story is viewed differently by each character. Some see it as a food source, others see it as deadly, and some see it as a sign that "the outside world is full of endurance".
Welty is noted for using mythology to connect her specific characters and locations to universal truths and themes. Examples can be found within the short story "A Worn Path", the novel
Delta Wedding, and the collection of short stories
The Golden Apples. In "A Worn Path", the character Phoenix has much in common with the mythical bird. Phoenixes are said to be red and gold and are known for their endurance and dignity. Phoenix, the old Black woman, is described as being clad in a red handkerchief with undertones of gold and is undeniably noble and enduring in her difficult quest for the medicine her grandson needs to live. In "Death of a Traveling Salesman", the husband is comparable to Prometheus. He comes home after bringing fire to his boss and is full of male libido and physical strength. Another common mythological reference is that of Medusa, who is used in "The Petrified Man" and other stories to represent powerful or vulgar women. Locations can also allude to mythology, as Welty proves in her novel Delta Wedding. As Professor Veronica Makowsky from the University of Connecticut writes, the setting of the Mississippi Delta has "suggestions of the goddess of love, Aphrodite or Venus-shells like that upon which Venus rose from the sea and female genitalia, as in the mound of Venus and Delta of Venus". The title The Golden Apples is also a mythological reference referring to the difference between people who seek silver apples and those who seek golden apples. It is originally from W.B. Yeats' "The Song of the Wandering Aengus", and for Welty's purposes, serves to illuminate the two types of attitudes people, specifically her characters, can take about life.
Honors
- 1954 – William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novel The Rise of...
medal for fiction, The Ponder Heart
- 1973 – Pulitzer Prize, The Optimist's Daughter
- 1980 – Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...
- 1981 – Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia
- 1983 – Invited by Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
to give the first annual Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization
- 1986 – National Medal of Arts
The National Medal of Arts is an award and title created by the United States Congress in 1984, for the purpose of honoring artists and patrons of the arts. It is the highest honor conferred to an individual artist on behalf of the people. Honorees are selected by the National Endowment for the...
.
- 1991 – National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
- 1991 – Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award The Helmerich Award
The Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award is an American literary prize awarded by the Tulsa Library Trust in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is bestowed annually upon an "internationally acclaimed" author who has "written a distinguished body of work and made a major contribution to the field of...
is presented annually by the Tulsa Library TrustThe Tulsa City-County Library is the major public library system in Tulsa County, Oklahoma.-Overview:The library system serves those who live, work, go to school in, own land in, or pay property taxes on land in Tulsa County. There are 25 branches in the system: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,...
.
- 1992 – Rea Award for the Short Story
- 1993 – Charles Frankel
Charles Frankel was an American philosopher.Born in to a Jewish family in New York City, he was the son of Abraham Philip and Estelle Edith Frankel. He married Helen Beatrice Lehman on August 17, 1941. Together they had two children, Susan and Carl.Frankel was educated at Columbia, Charles...
Prize, National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
- 1993 – PEN
PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
/Malamud Award for the Short Story
- 1993 – Distinguished Alumni Award, American Association of State Colleges and Universities
- 1996 – French Légion d’Honneur
- 1998 – First living author to have her works published in the prestigious Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
series.
Short story collections
- A Worn Path, 1940
- A Curtain of Green
A Curtain of Green was the first collection of short stories written by Eudora Welty. In these stories Welty looks at the state of Mississippi through the eyes of its inhabitants, the common people, both black and white, and presents a realistic view of the racial relations that existed at the time...
, 1941
- The Wide Net and Other Stories, 1943
- Music from Spain
"Music from Spain" is a short story by Eudora Welty, published in 1948 as a limited edition monograph by the Levee Press in Greenville, Mississippi, and as a part of the novel The Golden Apples in 1949....
, 1948
- The Golden Apples, 1949
- Selected Stories, 1954
- The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, 1955
- Thirteen Stories, 1965
- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty is, as the name suggests, a collection of stories by Eudora Welty. It was published by Harvest Publishing in 1982 and demonstrates the author's ability to write from the point of view of diverse characters ranging from Aaron Burr to a deaf black servant boy, a...
, 1982
- Moon Lake and Other Stories, 1980
- Morgana: Two Stories from The Golden Apples, 1988
Novels
- The Robber Bridegroom (novella), 1942
- Delta Wedding, 1946
- The Ponder Heart, 1954
- The Shoe Bird (juvenile), 1964
- Losing Battles, 1970
- The Optimist's Daughter
The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning 1972 short novel by Eudora Welty. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. He fails to recover from the surgery, though,...
, 1972
Commemoration
- Eudora
Eudora is an e-mail client used on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supports several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS....
, the name given to the Internet email program developed by Steve DornerSteve Dorner is an American software engineer. He developed the Eudora e-mail client in 1988 as a part of his work as a staff member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dorner was hired by Qualcomm in July 1992 and Eudora was subsequently acquired by Qualcomm...
in 1990, was inspired by Welty's story "Why I Live at the P.O."
- The state of Mississippi established a "Eudora Welty Day".
- Each October, Mississippi University for Women
Mississippi University for Women, also known as MUW or simply the "W" is a four-year coeducational public university located in Columbus, Mississippi. It was formerly known as Industrial Institute and College and later Mississippi State College for Women...
hosts the "Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium" to promote and celebrate the work of contemporary Southern writers.
- Mississippi State University sculpture professor, Critz Campbell, has designed furniture inspired by Welty that has been featured in the Smithsonian Magazine, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, Elle Magazine and the Discovery Channel.
External links