Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty (born 1909) is considered one of the most important authors of the twentieth century. Although the majority of her stories were set in the American South and reflected the region's language and culture, critics agreed that Welty's treatment of universal themes and her wide-ranging artistic influences clearly transcended regional boundaries. She was the first living writer to have a commemoration of works published by the Library of America.

Born in Jackson, Mississippi at a time when that city had not yet lost its rural atmosphere, Welty grew up in the bucolic South she so often evokes in her stories. She attended the Mississippi State College for Women and the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in English Literature, then studied advertising at Columbia University; however, graduating at the height of the Great Depression, she was unable to find work in her chosen field. Returning to Jackson in 1931, Welty worked as a part-time journalist and copywriter and as a WPA photographer. The latter job took her on assignments throughout Mississippi, and she began using these experiences as material for short stories. In June, 1936, her story "Death of a Traveling Salesman" was accepted for publication in the journal Manuscript, and within two years her work had appeared in such prestigious publications as the Atlantic and the Southern Review. Critical response to Welty's first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green (1941), was highly favorable, with many commentators predicting that a first performance so impressive would no doubt lead to even greater achievements. Yet when The Wide Net, and Other Stories was published two years later, several critics, most notably Diana Trilling, deplored Welty's marked shift away from the colorful realism of her earlier stories toward a more impressionistic style, objecting in particular to her increased use of symbol and metaphor to convey themes. Other critics responded favorably, including Robert Penn Warren, who wrote that in Welty's work, "the items of fiction (scene, action, character, etc.) are presented not as document but as comment, not as a report but as a thing made, not as history but as idea."

As Welty continued to refine her vision her fictional techniques gained wider acceptance. Indeed, her most complex and highly symbolic collection of stories, The Golden Apples, won critical acclaim, and she received a number of prizes and awards throughout the following decade, including the William Dean Howells Medal of the Academy of Arts and Letters for her novella The Ponder Heart (1954). Occupied primarily with teaching, traveling, and lecturing between 1955 and 1970, Welty produced little fiction. Then, in the early 1970s, she published two novels, Losing Battles (1970), which received mixed reviews, and the more critically successful The Optimist's Daughter (1972), which won a Pulitzer Prize. Although Welty has published no new volumes of short stories since The Bride of Innisfallen in 1955, the release of her Collected Stories in 1980 renewed interest in her short fiction and brought unanimous praise. In addition, the 1984 publication of Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, an autobiographical work chronicling her own artistic development, further illuminated her work and inspired critics to reinterpret many of her stories.

In his seminal 1944 essay on The Wide Net, and Other Stories, Robert Penn Warren located the essence of Welty's fictional technique in a phrase from her story "First Love": "Whatever happened, it happened in extraordinary times, in a season of dreams." It is, states Warren, "as though the author cannot be quite sure what did happen, cannot quite undertake to resolve the meaning of the recorded event, cannot, in fact, be too sure of recording all of the event." This tentative approach to narrative exposition points to Welty's primary goal in creating fiction, which was not simply to relate a series of events, but to convey a strong sense of her character's experience of that specific moment in time, always acknowledging the ambiguous nature of reality. In order to do so, she selected those details that can best vivify the narrative, frequently using metaphors and similes to communicate sensory impressions. The resulting stories were highly impressionistic. Welty typically used traditional symbols and mythical allusions in her work and, in the opinion of many, it was through linking the particular with the general and the mundane with the metaphysical that she attained her transcendent vision of human existence.

Welty's stories display a marked diversity in content, form, and mood. Many of her stories are light and humorous, while others deal with the tragic and the grotesque. Her humorous stories frequently rely upon the comic possibilities of language, as in both "Why I Live at the P.O." and The Ponder Heart, which exploit the humor in the speech patterns and colorful idiom of their southern narrators. In addition, Welty employed irony to comic effect, and many critics consider this aspect of her work one of its chief strengths. Opinions are divided, however, on the effectiveness of Welty's use of the grotesque. While Trilling and others find Welty's inclusion of such elements as the carnival exhibits in "Petrified Man" exploitative and superfluous, Eunice Glenn maintains that Welty created "scenes of horror" in order to "make everyday life appear as it often does, without the use of a magnifying glass, to the person with extraordinary acuteness of feeling."

Critics of Welty's work agree that these same literary techniques which produced her finest stories were also the cause of her most outstanding failures, noting that she was at her best when objective observation and subjective revelation are kept in balance and that where the former was neglected, she was ineffective. They remark further, however, that such instances are comparatively rare in Welty's work. Many critics considered Welty's skillful use of language her single greatest achievement, citing in particular the poetic richness of her narratives and her acute sensitivity to the subtleties and peculiarities of human speech. Yet the majority of commentators concur with Glenn's assertion that "it is her profound search of human consciousness and her illumination of the underlying causes of the compulsions and fears of modern man that would seem to comprise the principal value of Miss Welty's work."

While critics do not concur on all aspects of Welty's fiction, the preeminence of her work remains unquestioned. Despite some early resistance to her style, Welty garnered much critical and popular respect for both her humorous colloquial stories and her more experimental works. Although she was known chiefly as a southern writer, the transcendent humanity conveyed in her stories placed her beyond regional classification, and she was widely regarded as one of the foremost fiction writers in America.

With the publication of The Eye of the Story and The Collected Stories, Eudora Welty achieved the recognition she had long deserved as an important contemporary American fiction writer. Her position was confirmed in 1984 when her autobiographical One Writer's Beginnings made the best-seller lists with sales exceeding 100,000 copies. During the early decades of her career, she was respected by fellow writers but often dismissed by critics as a regionalist, a miniaturist, or an oversensitive "feminine" writer. The late 1970s and 1980s, however, saw a critical reevaluation of her work demonstrating, as Michael Kreyling declared in Eudora Welty's Achievement of Order, "that it is not primarily regional writing, or even excellent regional writing, but is the vision of a certain artist who must be considered with her peers--[Virginia] Woolf, [Elizabeth] Bowen, and [E. M.] Forster...."

Marked by a subtle, lyrical narrative state, Welty's work typically explored the intricacies of the interior life and the small heroisms of ordinary people. In an article appearing in Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, Chester E. Eisinger described the writer's unique combination of realistic and modernist traditions: "Her work reflects the careful disorder of Chekhovian fiction and the accurate yet spontaneous rendering of detail that belonged to [Anton Chekhov's] slice of life technique. It reflects the modernism,... that characterized Woolf's fiction: The door she opened for Welty, she herself had passed through with [James] Joyce, [Franz] Kafka, [Marcel] Proust, [Robert] Musil, and the other twentieth-century makers of experimental, avant-garde fiction." Eisinger had in mind Woolf's rejection of the clear plot structure of the traditional novel, her internalization of experience, her careful rendering of the minutiae of ordinary life, her poetic use of language, and her fragmented point-of-view. Woolf opened another door for Welty as well, demonstrating in To the Lighthouse how to center a serious novel in the experiences of women.

Although Welty always distanced herself from the women's movement, feminist critical interest in the works of women writers also stimulated renewed attention to her fiction in the 1970s and 1980s. In an article collected in Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, Margaret Jones Bolsterli expressed some of the major assumptions of the feminist approach when she argues that "Understanding women's views of themselves and of men is necessary if we are ever going to get at the truth, and the vision Eudora Welty presents of the women's worlds in [her] novels illuminates not only half of the great world which we do not often see, but also touches gently sometimes on the terrible state of affairs on this darkling plain when men and women do not see each other clearly at all." The reading public and the scholarly establishment began to realize that a major body of American fiction had been produced by Southern women writers, as Anne Goodwyn Jones documented in Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859- 1936. Moreover, critics perceived that Welty, the most prolific and versatile of these writers, was producing works of an astonishing range: from folktale to historical romance, grotesque farce to novel of manners; from dramatizations of lives contained by sharecropping cabins of the Depression to portraits of relationships in Delta plantations and upper-middle-class suburbs. And all these modes and subject matters are complemented by the distinguished essays, reviews, and reminiscences collected in The Eye of the Story and One Writer's Beginnings.

The oldest of her family's three children and the only girl, Welty grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. That neither of her parents came from the Deep South may have given her some detachment from her culture and helped her become an astute observer of its manners. Her father, Christian Welty, had been raised on a farm in Ohio and had become a country schoolteacher in West Virginia. Marrying a fellow teacher, Chestina Andrews, he had moved to Jackson to improve his fortunes by entering business. From bookkeeper in an insurance company, he eventually advanced to president.

Chestina Andrews, the daughter of transplanted Virginians, had grown up on a mountain in West Virginia. At fifteen, she had taken her critically ill father down an icy river on a raft to the railroad and then to a hospital in Baltimore where he died on the operating table of a ruptured appendix. In later years she took her young daughter on memorable summer visits "up home"; Welty's formidable grandmother and five bachelor uncles make a poignant fictional appearance in their mountaintop world as Laurel Hand's grandmother and uncles in The Optimist's Daughter.

Welty's reminiscences describe a happy childhood in a close-knit, bookish family. One of her earliest memories was the sound of her parents' voices reading favorite books to one another in the evenings. The Welty children were provided with fairy tales and mythology, dictionaries and encyclopedias, and library cards that allowed young Eudora to practice what she later called, in an essay employing the phrase as a title, "a sweet devouring" of the riches in the Jackson public library. Her delight in the gossip and storytelling that were such a vital part of traditional small-town Southern life was as great as her passion for books. Welty has often said that when her mother's friends would come to visit, she would demand, "Now start talking!" Her experiences of listening established a lifelong pleasure in folktale, mythology, tall tales, humorous anecdote, and comic idiom, which are special marks of her fiction.

Welty's education in the Jackson schools was followed by two years at Mississippi State College for Women between 1925 and 1927, and then by two more years at the University of Wisconsin and a B.A. in 1929. Her father, who believed that she could never earn a living by writing stories, encouraged her to study advertising at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York during 1930-1931. The years in Wisconsin and New York broadened Welty's horizons, and the time she spent in New York City was especially meaningful. The Harlem Renaissance was at its height, and Welty and her friends went to dances in Harlem clubs and to musical and theatrical performances all over the city. "Everybody that was wonderful was then at their peak," the writer told Jan Norby Gretlund in an interview collected in Conversations with Eudora Welty. "For somebody who had never, in a sustained manner, been to the theater or to the Metropolitan Museum, where I went every Sunday, it was just a cornucopia."

Her father's sudden death in 1931 brought an end to Welty's northern sojourn. She went home to help her mother and brothers, and she has essentially remained in Jackson ever since. To support herself, Welty first tried various small jobs with local newspapers and with radio station WJDX, which her father had started in the tower of his insurance building. Then, in 1933, she was offered a position as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). "I did reporting, interviewing," she explained to Jean Todd Freeman in an interview collected in Conversations with Eudora Welty. "It took me all over Mississippi, which is the most important thing to me, because I'd never seen it.... [The experience] was the real germ of my wanting to become a real writer, a true writer."

In her travels around Mississippi, Welty was learning the art of seeing and capturing significant moments in the lives of ordinary people, an art she first practiced with a camera. She took hundreds of photographs of Mississippians of all social classes, capturing them at work and at leisure with their friends and families. Although her camera was not much better than a Brownie, the results were so effective that she took them to New York and tried to interest a publisher. The majority of the pictures are of blacks, providing a rare documentation that celebrates lives of quiet dignity and joy in the midst of hardship. But publishers felt Welty's photographs would not be able to compete with Roll, Jordon, Roll, a sentimental "Old South" collection by Dorothy Peterkin and Doris Ullman, and Welty could only arrange a one- woman show in 1936 in a small gallery on Madison Avenue. In 1971, however, the best of these pictures were published as One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression; A Snapshot Album.

Welty's WPA work of the mid-1930s provided her with far more than visual training. Seeing at first hand the Depression-struck lives of rural and small-town people in a state that had always been the poorest in the nation, she was stimulated to capture their struggles and triumphs in stories, beginning with "Death of a Traveling Salesman," which was published in the literary magazine Manuscript in 1936. Other stories followed during the next five years, including some of her most famous--"Why I Live at the P.O.," "Powerhouse," "A Worn Path," "Petrified Man," "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies." Six stories were accepted by Southern Review between 1937 and 1939 and earned her the friendship and admiration of writers Albert Erskine, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, and Ford Madox Ford. In a 1949 Kenyon Review essay Warren commented on the contrast between "the said, or violent, or warped" subjects of the stories and a tone that is "exhilarating, even gay, as though the author were innocently delighted ... with the variety of things that stories could be and still be stories." These early works established Welty's characteristic comic genius with dialogue and with recording the incongruous developments of everyday life. Here she also developed a way of treating poverty, loss, and pain with a lightness that amounts to exquisite respect and discretion. In 1941 a collection of these stories was published as A Curtain of Green with a preface by Katherine Anne Porter. As Ruth Vande Kieft explains in Eudora Welty, the stories "are largely concerned with the mysteries of the inner life," "the enigma of man's being--his relation to the universe; what is secret, concealed, inviolable in any human being, resulting in distance or separation between human beings; the puzzles and difficulties we have about our own feelings, our meaning and our identity."

Welty's first sustained experiment with folk materials appeared in 1942 as The Robber Bridegroom, a bold fusing of Mississippi history, tall tale, and fairytales of mysterious seducers drawn from British and Germanic sources as well as from the Greek story of Cupid and Psyche. Here, as Carol Manning explains in With Ears Opening Like Morning Glories: Eudora Welty and the Love of Storytelling, the innocent tone of the narrative counteracts the dire stuff of robberies, murders, and the depredations of a cruel stepmother. To many early reviewers the result seemed pure magic. Alfred Kazin claimed in a review for the New York Herald Tribune Books that Welty had captured "the lost fabulous innocence of our departed frontier, the easy carelessness, the fond bragging and colossal buckskin strut." In the New York Times Book Review, Marianne Hauser called it "a modern fairy tale, where irony and humor, outright nonsense, deep wisdom and surrealistic extravaganzas become a poetic unity through the power of a pure, exquisite style." Although some other commentators found it lacking in substance, Kreyling has defended The Robber Bridegroom as a valuable addition to the pastoral tradition in American literature: "Welty seems to be saying that the dream of a pastoral paradise on earth is always one step ahead of the dreamers; it is, sadly, only possible in a dream world removed from contact with human flesh and imperfections. But still worth dreaming."

Welty continued to experiment with such materials in her next collection, The Wide Net, and Other Stories. Here she explored the interrelationships of everyday Mississippi life with the timeless themes and patterns of myth, creating for her apparently ordinary characters a universality that links them with all times and cultures. The title story, for instance, places a domestic quarrel within the context of fertility tales; the work climaxes with a descent into a watery underworld where the hero encounters "the King of the Snakes" and proves worthy to return to his pregnant wife. In an essay appearing in Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, Garvin Davenport sees each of the stories in The Wide Net as presenting "at least one character who confronts or encounters a situation which is in some way dark, mysterious or dreamlike. Each such encounter contributes to an awakening or renewal--sometimes only temporarily--of that character's potential for emotional enrichment and experiential meaning. If the nature of the encounter often suggests a kind of regression to a more primitive or fundamental level of consciousness, the overall structures of the stories make clear that it is regression as a phase in problem- solving...."

Welty's first novel, Delta Wedding, marks a significant change in her focus. Fertility myth still runs as an undercurrent through the daily affairs described in the book, but Welty shifted from the dreamlike atmosphere of The Wide Net to the ordinary milieu of family life in the Mississippi Delta. Many of the circumstances of the Fairchild family in Delta Wedding recall those of the Ramsay family in Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The center of the Fairchild family is a mother of eight who continually ministers to her husband, her children, and a wider circle of relatives and friends. The novel is organized around domestic imagery of cooking and eating, wedding preparations, and diplomatic maneuvers to avert conflicts and soothe hurt feelings so that the wedding, on which the work centers, can occur. Both Woolf's and Welty's novels admiringly explore the experience and values of women characters and celebrate the community, harmony, and renewal created by mothers for their families.

The narrative technique is similar to Woolf's in its use of multiple perspectives. In Welty's case the observers are all female, from nine- year-old Laura McRaven, a visiting cousin, to the mother, Ellen Fairchild, and her many daughters. In an interview collected in Conversations with Eudora Welty, the writer told Jo Brans that the world of Delta Wedding is a matriarchy but that it is not at all hostile to men. Men, instead, are the objects of loving attention and perform the occasional acts of heroism that are necessary to protect the charmed and fertile pastoral world of the plantation. Chief among these men is Uncle George Fairchild, who reenacts in modern form the mythic rescue of a maiden from a dragon by St. George. In this case, the dragon is an approaching train, and George Fairchild's rush to pull his niece from the track symbolically expresses his function for the whole Fairchild family.

Welty's allusion to the St. George myth is part of a more complex fabric of myth that bolsters the novel's celebration of human fertility and community. Underlying the story of Dabney Fairchild's wedding to the overseer of the Fairchild family's plantation is the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, archetypal mother and daughter.

In the myth, the earth opens up at the feet of the maiden daughter of the goddess Demeter, and Hades (or Pluto) snatches her away to become his bride in his underworld kingdom. In grief, Demeter causes sterility to plague the earth until her daughter is restored, and Persephone's return comes to symbolize the return of vegetation in the spring. In Welty's novel, although the mother loses her daughter to a frightening bridegroom, the loss is only temporary and actually necessary to the initiation of a new cycle of fertility in the family. Delta Wedding ends in a picnic feast celebrating the return of bride and groom from their honeymoon and the reunion of the family.

Manning argues that with Delta Wedding "the Southern family and community replace the isolated individual and the abnormal one as Welty's favorite focus." Certainly this first novel initiates the period of the writer's creative maturity and her mastery of complex casts of characters. Themes that accompany the emphasis on community include the precariousness of marriage and the intimate suffering it involves, the weight of family tradition and the accompanying tension caused by the need of the young to break out and affirm their individuality, and the stark and hopeless loss that the living must accommodate after the death of parents and mates.

Delta Wedding was followed in 1949 by The Golden Apples, a closely related group of stories that functions almost as a novel. The Golden Apples depicts several families in the little town of Morgana, Mississippi, during the 1930s or early 1940s, focusing particularly on the defiant and talented Virgie Rainey, who rejects the conventional life of a Southern lady and creates an independent existence for herself while helping her widowed mother run her dairy farm. Fertility myths weave through these stories with particular attention given to the Pan-like figure of King Maclain, who wanders in and out of town seducing maidens like a mythical satyr and then disappearing in almost a twinkling of cloven hooves. But the main emphasis remains on the lives of the townspeople--the growing pains of children, the tragicomic disappointment of the fierce German music teacher Miss Eckhart, the near-drowning of an orphan girl at summer camp, and then the aging of the community and blighting of the lives of many characters who began as children full of possibility in the early stories.

In a 1984 PMLA essay Patricia Yeager emphasized Welty's subversive exploration to traditional gender distinctions in these stories, arguing that she deliberately transgresses masculine and feminine symbolic boundaries in order to call them into question. For Yeager, "the most interesting and persistent rhetorical strategy Welty employs in The Golden Apples was to continually shift the figure and ground of her story, allowing `male' discourse and female desire to contrast with, to comment on, and to influence each other as each becomes the ground on which the figure of the other begins to interact."

Welty's next book, The Ponder Heart, is a comic tour de force that concentrates many of her favorite themes in the dramatic events of an eccentric Southern gentleman's life. Set in the small town of Clay, Mississippi, The Ponder Heart is ostensibly an examination of the "heart" or character of Uncle Daniel Ponder, narrated by his spinster niece Edna Earle. Uncle Daniel is one of Welty's typical make heroes who unaccountably marries a selfish and brassy lower-class girl. (George Fairchild of Delta Wedding and Judge McKelva of The Optimist's Daughter are two more serious versions of the type.) In a tone combining sympathy and outrage, Edna Earle describes her uncle's wooing of seventeen-year-old Bonnie Dee Peacock in a dime store, their elopement, her desertion, return, death and burial, and Uncle Daniel's trial for murder.

Playful use of cliche, giddy inversion of social conventions, and the juxtaposition of kindly motives and silly disasters prevent the story from every moving outside the realm of farce. When Uncle Daniel literally tickles his wife to death in an attempt to distract her from her fear of a thunderstorm, readers can only laugh and recognize the ridiculous dimensions of the most painful human experiences. The Ponder Heart can also be seen as a satire on the ideal of the Southern gentleman, a satire which is quite horrifying beneath its humor. The old husband does in fact murder his estranged wife during an attempted reconciliation; family and friends side with him, as does the tone of the novella, so that the death of the young wife is a joke at best and only an inconvenience at worst. Welty received the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for The Ponder Heart in 1955; and the work was successfully translated into a Broadway play in 1956 and adapted as an opera bouffe in 1982.

In 1955, Welty published another collected of short stories, The Bride of Innisfallen, and Other Stories, experimenting with a more allusive style. Three of the stories--"Circe," "Going to Naples," and "The Bride of Innisfallen"--are set in Europe and lack the vivid sense of place that gives solidity to most of Welty's fiction. The other four stories operate in familiar Mississippi settings. With the exception of "The Burning," a cryptic account of the burning of a plantation by Yankee soldiers during the Civil War, most continue Welty's comedy of small-town manners: adulterous trysts are foiled by rain and curious children ("Ladies in Spring") or by heat and spiritual fatigue ("No Place for You, My Love"), and a visiting niece offers bemused observations on and childhood memories of her Mississippi relatives' social milieu ("Kin").

In the years between 1955 and 1970, Welty published only a few occasional pieces and a children's story, The Shoe Bird. These were years of personal difficulty, as she nursed her mother through a long final illness and lost both of her brothers. She was nevertheless at work on long projects, notably Losing Battles, which she continued to shape for a decade. This ambitious, rollicking novel of a family reunion in the Mississippi hill country initiated a second flowering of Welty's career. In an interview collected in Conversations with Eudora Welty, she explained to Charles Bunting that a major purpose of the novel was to show indomitability in the tireless though losing battles of a spinster schoolteacher to educate her community, and in the strong ties of the Renfro clan who are celebrating the ninetieth birthday of the family matriarch and awaiting the return from jail of a reckless favorite son. The Renfro family picnic becomes the focal point for the examination of family tensions, the settling of old scores, and the celebration of resulting harmony.

One Time, One Place, the collection of photographs from Welty's 1930s WPA travels, appeared in 1971, followed in 1972 by Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Optimist's Daughter. The sparest of her novels, it recounts an adult daughter's return to Mississippi to be with her elderly father during an eye operation and then to preside over his funeral a few weeks later. As Laurel Hand confronts her memories of both parents, she comes to understand the pain of her mother's dying years and their effect on her father. Laurel is reconciled to her father's unwise second marriage to a ruthless young woman, and at the same time finally recognizes her own grief for the husband she has lost many years before. Welty's exploration of grief in The Optimist's Daughter which was in part a working-out of her own losses during the 1960s, contains many autobiographical elements, particularly in the portrait of Laurel's mother. But the novel is also a close fictional examination of the interdependence of child and parents. In an interview collected in Conversations with Eudora Welty, Welty told Martha van Noppen that she "tried to give that feeling of support and dependence that just ran in an endless line among the three of them [mother, father, and daughter]." Finally, Laurel Hand works through her grief to achieve a calmer and more practical accommodation with the past.

Losing Battles and The Optimist's Daughter brought renewed attention to Welty's writing and consequently an increasingly heavy burden of requests for interviews and speaking engagements. She continued to protect the essential privacy of her daily life, however, by discouraging biographic inquiries, carefully screening interviews, and devoting most of her energies to her work. During the later 1970s this work consisted largely of collecting her nonfiction writings for publication as The Eye of the Story and of assembling her short stories as The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. With these two important collections she rounded out the shape of her life's work in literary commentary and fiction.

An invitation to give a series of lectures at Harvard in 1983 resulted in the three autobiographical pieces published as One Writer's Beginnings the next year. Perhaps because she wished to forestall potential biographers or because she came to accept public interest in a writer's early experiences in shaping her vision, Welty provided in One Writer's Beginnings a recreation of the world that nourished her own imagination. Characteristically, however, she omitted family difficulties and intimate matters, focusing instead on the family love of books and storytelling, the values and examples her parents provided, and the physical sensations of life in Jackson that influenced her literary sensitivities.

Welty's fictional chronicle of Mississippi life adds a major comic vision to American literature, a vision that affirms the sustaining power of community and family life and at the same time explores the need for solitude. In his 1944 essay, Robert Penn Warren aptly identifies these twin themes in Welty's work as love and separateness. While much of modern American fiction has emphasized alienation and the failure of love, Welty's stories show how tolerance and generosity allow people to adapt to each other's foibles and to painful change. Welty's fiction particularly celebrates the love of men and women, the fleeting joys of childhood, and the many dimensions and stages of women's lives.

In August of 2000, Country Churchyards, with photographs by Welty, excerpts from her previous writings, and new essays by other writers, was published. Welty was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York on October 7, 2000.

Eudora Welty died in Jackson, Mississippi in July 2001. Although her last new work was published in 1973, she continued to write until her death. Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Ford was named her literary executor, and it will be his decision whether to any of Welty's later material is published.

Associated Works

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Eudora Welty (1909-)
• At the time of Welty's birth:
• Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States
• Manhattan Bridge opened in New York
• Henry Ford began first assembly-line automobile manufacturing
• NAACP was founded
• The times:
• 1914-1918: World War I
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1991: Persian Gulf War
• 1992-1996: Civil War in Bosnia
• Welty's contemporaries:
• John Steinbeck (1902-1968) American writer
• Graham Greene (1904-1991) writer
• Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) writer/playwright
• Simone Beauvoir (1908-1986) French feminist writer
• Edwin Land (1909-1991) inventor/polaroid
• Mother Teresa (1910-) missionary
• Selected world events:
• 1912: The U.S. lands Marines in Honduras to protect American property and investment in the Central American state
• 1923: Mussolini dissolves all non-Fascist parties in Italy
• 1934: Shirley Temple makes her first full-length film
• 1949: William Faulkner awarded Nobel Prize for literature
• 1952: Iran breaks off diplomatic relations with Britain
• 1960: In response to Cuban anti-U.S. policies, President Eisenhower orders a 95 percent cut in Cuban sugar imports
• 1972: President Idi Amin of Uganda orders 60,000 Asians out of the country within 90 days
• 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party
• 1993: Bomb explosion at New York's World Trade Center kills six and injures hundreds

Further Reading

• Abadie, Ann J. and Louis D. Dollarhide, editors, Eudora Welty: A Form of Thanks, University Press of Mississippi, 1979.
• Aevlin, Albert J., Welty: A Life in Literature, 1987.
• Appel, Alfred, Jr., A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Louisiana State University Press, 1965.
• Balakian, Nona and Charles Simmons, editors, The Creative Present, Doubleday, 1963.
• Bloom, Harold, editor, Welty, 1986.
• Bryant, Joseph A., Jr., Eudora Welty, University of Minnesota Press, 1968.
• Carson, Barbara Harrell, Eudora Welty: Two Pictures at Once in Her Frame, Whitston, 1992.