Eudora Welty

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Eudora Welty

• April 13, 1909 July 23, 2001

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Biographical Information

• Eudora Welty was a lifelong resident of Jackson,
  Mississippi and never left the house her family
  built.
• First generation Southerner whose family was
  considered upper-class.
• Lived a very sheltered life.
• Received her B.A. from University of Wisconsin
  attended N.Y. Columbia University School of
  Business.
• Tragically, her father died in 1931 from
  leukemia. This devastated Welty because he
  encouraged her in her dream of becoming a writer.
• After The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), for
  fifteen years, no major work was published
  Welty took care of her dying mother and her
  family.

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Personal Information Continued..

• Welty wrote short fiction stories, novels, essays
  and published some of her photography.
• Welty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for
  her novel, The Optimists Daughter.
• This novel is her most nearly autobiographical
  out of her work.
• Weltys personal favorite of her books is the
  collection of short stories The Golden Apples,
  published in 1949.
• Welty never married. She said in an interview
  that It never came up!

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Eudora Weltys Writings

• A Curtain of Green (1941) The Robber
  Bridegroom (1942)
• The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943)
  Delta Wedding (1946)
• The Golden Apples (1949) The Ponder Heart
  (1954)
• The Bride of Innisfallen (1955) Place
  in Fiction (1955)
• The Shoe Bird (1964)
  Thirteen Stories (1965)
• A Sweet Devouring (1969) Losing
  Battles (1970)
• One Time, One Place (1971) The Optimists
  Daughter (1972)
• The Eye of the Story (1978) Miracles
  of Perception (1980)
• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980)
• One Writers Beginnings (1984)
  A Worn Path (1981)
• A Writers Eye Collected Book Reviews (1994)

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Themes Style

• Southern Gothic Time magazine explains Southern
  Gothic as, the demented, the deformed, the
  queer. Welty incorporated the stereotypes, myths
  and the clichés associated with the South into
  her stories. An example of this would be The
  Petrified Man.
• Fairytales Not your typical story like
  Cinderella. It is considered fantasy due to the
  language she uses in the stories and the way she
  makes the stories magical and artificial. They
  are like a fable, making it hard to believe. For
  example The Robber Bridegroom.

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Literary Criticism

• Petrified Man
  Images of mutilation and
  disfigurement, of sadism, castration and abortion
  lurk just beneath the hilarious surface The
  gossipy mode of the story levels all events to
  perverse entertainment.
  1980 New York Book Review by Maureen
  Howard.
• Death of a Traveling Salesman
  (Response to another critics
  thoughts)
  Griffith challenges Jones association of
  Bowman with Hercules and argues instead that the
  Prometheus story more aptly applies as mythic
  parallel, and association made by Welty. The
  story a parable of modern mans need to abandon
  the vanities of his current civilization to
  have the elemental gifts restored by some
  Promethean benefactor.

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Death of a Traveling Salesman

• Eudora Welty published this short story in a
  magazine in in 1936. It was
  the first of her storied to be accepted
  for publication.
• After Welty saw the story in print, it went
  under major revision
  before she added it to her first volume of short
  stories, A Curtin of Green.
• This story and many other of her stories are
  gathered in books such as, The Collected Stories
  of Eudora Welty and A Curtain of Green.
• Summary This story is about a traveling salesman
  who drives his car off a cliff and seeks the help
  from a local husband and wife. In doing this, he
  finds our things about himself and what he really
  wants out of life. The story explains in what way
  the salesman is dying.
• John Rood, the editor at Manuscript thought
  that it was one of the best stories we have ever
  read.
• After this story was released, Welty was
  encouraged to write a novel.

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Why I Live at the P.O.

• Second of Weltys work to be published in the
  Atlantic Monthly. By this magazine accepting
  these works, it put Welty on the national
  literary scene.
• Considered on of Weltys best work.
• Interpretation Welty explains, it was and
  exercise in using the spoken work to tell a
  story. The geographical isolation of Southerners
  is a motivation that encourages our sense of
  exaggeration and the comic as well as expresses
  the true concern that people fell for each
  other.
• Welty reads Why I Live at the P.O. and two
  other short stories in New York
  on January 22, 1953 at 92nd
  Street Y.