Getting to Know Eudora Welty
Editor’s Note: Our friend Mary Jo Tate, a longtime Close Reads listener, also happens to be an expert in the life and work of Eudora Welty, so as we work our way through The Optimist’s Daughter it seems only right to let her Mary Jo provide a starter kit for the life and work of this wonderful Southern writer. Hope you enjoy.
—David
Getting to Know Eudora Welty
by Mary Jo Tate
Eudora Alice Welty (1909–2001), the oldest of three surviving children of Christian and Chestina Andrews Welty, lived in Jackson, Mississippi nearly all her life. Her parents’ love of learning and her passion for reading supplemented her public-school education.
Her earliest writing appeared in St. Nicholas magazine, her high school newspaper, and the campus publications of Mississippi State College for Women, which she attended for two years, and the University of Wisconsin, where she graduated in 1929 with a B.A. in English. Welty’s mother supported her desire to become a writer—thinking it would be safe, but her father encouraged her to learn practical job skills, so she also spent a year at Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York.
In early 1936, forty-five of Welty’s photographs were exhibited at a one-woman show in New York. After a variety of part-time jobs during the Depression, her first full-time job as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) later that year took her all over Mississippi to interview and write about the people and places of her home state. This experience stocked her imagination with impressions that would fill her fiction in the years ahead. In addition, taking photographs taught her what she called a story-writer’s truth: “The thing to wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves. . . . Every feeling waits upon its gesture” (One Time, One Place, 6–7). You can see many of her photographs in the book Photographs, published in 1989.
Soon, her stories began to sell to periodicals, and in 1941 her first book, A Curtain of Green—a collection of seventeen stories—was published. This was quickly followed by a novella, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), and another collection, The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), both set on the Natchez Trace. Her first novel, Delta Wedding (1946), set on a Mississippi plantation in 1923, was initially criticized for not addressing political issues. In her 1965 essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?”, she would explain her refusal to let social activism dominate her fiction.
Welty went to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949–1950 and made several more European trips in the next four decades. She also visited New York and San Francisco multiple times, but her primary residence after college remained the house at 1109 Pinehurst Street in Jackson, where her family had moved when she was sixteen.
In 1949 The Golden Apples, her masterful collection of interrelated modernist short stories influenced by mythology, was published. The Ponder Heart, a humorous novella in the form of an extended dramatic monologue, was published in 1954 and dramatized on Broadway in 1956. Her 1955 collection, The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, includes stories set in Mississippi, Louisiana, Italy, and Ireland.
Caring for her ill mother consumed most of the 1950s and 1960s. Her brother Walter died in 1959, then in a single week in January 1966, both her mother and her brother Edward died. Devastated, Welty struggled to finish Losing Battles, the novel she had been working on for a decade. Early in 1967, she drew on her experience of loss to begin a new long story, “The Optimist’s Daughter.” The New Yorker magazine immediately accepted it but had to wait until 1969 to publish the entire story in a single issue.
Meanwhile, Welty finally completed Losing Battles, a long novel set at a family reunion in the 1930s. It was published in 1970 and was her first book on the best-seller lists. She revised and expanded The Optimist’s Daughter, which was published as a book in 1972 and won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize.
Welty’s delightful memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, began as a series of three lectures which she delivered at Harvard University in 1983 and revised for publication in 1984. In sections titled “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice,” she explored the influences that made her a writer, ending with this statement: “As you have seen, 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” (104).
Collections of Welty’s essays, reviews, photographs, and stories were published in her later years, and she was the first living writer to be included in the Library of America series.
While Welty was initially considered a regional Southern author—sometimes a limiting classification—her significance as a major American writer was eventually acknowledged by at least thirty-nine honorary degrees and election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the William Dean Howells Medal, the National Medal of Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, and the French Legion of Honor.
On July 23, 2001, Welty died of cardiopulmonary failure. She was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, which she had often photographed, within sight of the house on North Congress Street where she was born.
So . . . if you’re new to reading Eudora Welty, where should you start?
I typically recommend starting with One Writer’s Beginnings (one of my top ten favorite books by any author) and following up with The Optimist’s Daughter (my favorite of her novels), which transmutes many details of her life into fiction. But beginning with the novel in conjunction with the podcast works just as well; in fact, it was published first. Either way, you’ll see lots of resonance between the novel and the memoir. I’m looking forward to teaching an online class on these two books this summer and hope you’ll join us!
Next, I suggest exploring her stories. The Essential Welty audiobook is a great introduction, as Welty herself reads “Why I Live at the P.O.” (hilarious—one of my favorites), “Powerhouse” (based on her experience at a Fats Waller concert), and “The Petrified Man” (a comic tale set in a small-town beauty parlor) in her charming Mississippi accent. If you want a sample of her stories over her career (including the three in the audio above, as well as “A Worn Path” and “A Still Moment”—two more of my favorites), check out Thirteen Stories.
Or perhaps you’d like to go straight to the comprehensive Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, about which Mary Lee Settle wrote in the Saturday Review, saying:
“The short story may be an American invention, but the tale is worldwide, as ancient as myth told by the fire at night; quiet, seductive, portentous, amoral. It is in this classic company that Eudora Welty takes her rightful place, with the ironic tenderness of Chekhov, the almost feral edge of Maupassant, the ominousness of Poe and Bierce, the lacy strength of Henry Green. She is probably the finest Mozartian stylist writing in the English language in this century.”
Welty also wrote insightful nonfiction. The Eye of the Story (1978) is a collection of her essays on writers (including Austen, Cather, and Chekhov), essays on writing (including “Place in Fiction” and “Some Notes on Time in Fiction”—two of the best essays I’ve ever read on those subjects), book reviews (including Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White and Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner—what a range!), and personal and occasional pieces such as “A Sweet Devouring,” about her love for reading.
Eudora Welty: A Biography is the definitive biography by Suzanne Marrs, who spent time with Welty daily for many years and had unprecedented access to her letters and papers.
Eudora Welty’s legacy continues through her home on Pinehurst Street, which she bequeathed to the State of Mississippi. Most of the contents are original, including much of the furniture, her typewriter, and her extensive personal library. I wept when I saw the set of Dickens that her mother had rescued from fire. The Eudora Welty House & Garden is one of the best-preserved literary homes in America, and I highly recommend a visit.
I had the blessing of briefly meeting Eudora Welty at a conference, where she signed my first edition of Delta Wedding. When I covered her funeral for the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 2001, I met her long-time next-door neighbor as we left the cemetery. While the neighbor and her daughters loved to hear Welty reminisce, she listened to their stories as well. In One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty describes her childhood habit of settling in the back seat of her parents’ car and instructing the adults, “Now talk” (13). Her neighbor told me that during her family’s visits with Welty, “The first thing she’d say when we’d sit down on the sofa was ‘What’s the news?’ a quiet, expectant voice.”
This eagerness to hear others’ stories and to really see and value people as they are was part of what made Eudora Welty such a gifted storyteller herself.
Mary Jo Tate is an international book editor and the author of Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Flourish: Balance for Homeschool Moms. A lifelong bibliophile, she teaches online literature classes to help high schoolers and adults understand, appreciate, and love great books. You can find out about her summer Welty class at http://eclectic-bibliophile.com/blog/weltyclass/ and her year-long literature classes at www.MaryJoTate.com.
Thank-you, Mary Jo!
Thank you for sharing your expertise! I particularly appreciate the points where her life shines through in the novel. The pain is palpable in the story. Now I can see why. I will need to continue getting to know her work.