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BIO
Eudora
Alice Welty was born on April 13, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi,
to Chestina Andrews Welty, a homemaker and avid gardener, and Christian
Webb Welty, a secretary and a director of Lamar Life Insurance Company. She
was exposed to the fine arts from an early age; her parents were
both music lovers and took her to the theater and concerts. Chestina
Welty was an avid reader, and she taught her daughter to read before
she catered the first grade at Jefferson Davis Elementary School
in January 1915. Welty spent much of her childhood devouring books
which included myths and nursery rhymes, the Brothers Grimm fairy
tales, and works by Edward Lear, Dickens, Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Mark Twain, and others. She also enjoyed drawing, playing the piano,
seeing movies, and learning about photography from her father, who
developed and printed his own photographs.
Welty won her first prize for writing before entering high school
--- the $25 award in the Jackie Mackie Jingles contest sponsored
by Mackie Pine Oil Specialty Co., which sent her a letter encouraging
her to "improve in poetry to such an extent to win fame." While
attending Jackson's Central High School, Welty had many of her sketches
and poems published in the school newspaper. With plans of becoming
a writer she enrolled in Mississippi State College in fall 1925,
and then transferred to University of Wisconsin, Madison for her
junior and senior years. It was here that she was first
exposed to modernist writers such as Woolf, Faulkner and Yeats,
but her aspirations turned toward becoming an artist. After graduating
with a BA degree in 1929, Welty began to focus on her interest in
photography and moved to New York City to attend a one-year advertising
course at Columbia University Graduate School of Business. But because
jobs were scarce during the Depression, she moved back home to look
for work in 1931.
Shortly after Welty's return home, her father died of leukemia.
She took a variety of odd jobs. She was a scriptwriter,
an editor of Lamar Life Radio News at WJIX, a publicity agent for
the WPA, and Jackson's social news correspondent for the Memphis
Commercial Appeal. Continuing to pursue a career in photography,
she sent a group of her photographs to a New York publisher in 1935.
They were rejected, but Welty persevered until Lugene Opticians
sponsored an exhibition of her prints at the Photographic Galleries
(March 31-April I5, 1936). She also submitted her short stories
to a literary magazine Manuscript, in Athens, Ohio, which accepted
Death of a Traveling Salesman" and "Magic."
Eudora Welty continued to work on her short stories in 1937, sending
several to Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, editors of the
newly established Southern Review at Louisiana State University.
Welty was so discouraged when they returned her story, "Petrified
Man," which other journals had also rejected, that she tore up her
only copy of it. When Warren expressed second thoughts about his
rejection, she rewrote the story from memory. In 1938 "Lily Daw
and the Three Ladies" appeared in The Best Short Stories 1938, and
in 1939 "A Curtain of Green" was chosen for The Best Short Stories
1939 and "Petrified Man" appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories of 1939,
but her collections of short stories continued to be rejected by
both English and American publishers.
In 1940 Welty took on literary agent Diarmuid Russell New York,
who placed her fiction in well-paying magazines like The New Yorker,
Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Bazaar. This was the beginning of
a close working relationship and enduring friendship between Russell
and Welty. Finally, in 1941, Doubleday, Doran offered her a contract
for a story collection, and A Curtain of Green, with an introduction
by Katherine Anne Porter, was published that November. In 1942 she
won a Guggenheim fellowship for writing fiction, and Doubleday,
Doran published the Robber Bridegroom. At the end of the year when
her editor John Woodburn left Doubleday for Harcourt Brace, Welty
moved with him. The Wide Net and Other Stories was published by
Harcourt the following September.
In 1944 Welty moved to New York City for the summer to work for
Robert Van Gelder at The New York Times Book Review, and continued
to write reviews when she returned to Jackson. In 1946 she traveled
to the West Coast, spending four months in San Francisco to write
short stories and lecture at the Northwest Pacific Writers' Conference
at the University of Washington. After a stint in New York, upon
hearing that her Guggenheim fellowship was renewed, Welty traveled
to Italy, France, England, and Ireland, where she visited Elizabeth
Bowen and worked on the short story, "The Bride of the Innisfallen."
Compiling a collection including the story, Welty dedicated THE
BRIDE OF INISFALLEN AND OTHER STORIES to Bowen when it was published
by Harcourt in January 1955.
Though Welty continued to live in Jackson, she made frequent trips
to the northeast. She, her mother, and their Jackson
friend chartered a plane to fly to New York to attend Joseph Fields
and Jerome Chodorov's adaptation of her novel THE PONDER HEART. In
1969, on a Ford Foundation grant, she spent two seasons of study
and observation at the Phoenix Theatre. She also spent a winter
term at Smith College in Massachusetts as a guest lecturer in 1962.
In October 1964 Welty's children's book, PEPE, THE SHOE BIRD, was
published by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. The following year Bennett
Cerf at Random House offered her a lucrative contract, but she opted
to remain with Harcourt. However, in 1969 when Harcourt demanded
that she make cuts to her draft of Losing Battles, which she had
begun years earlier while caring for her recuperating mother, Welty
terminated her contract and signed a four-book deal with Random
House.
LOSING BATTLES was published by Random House on her birthday. The
novel was nominated for a 1971 National Book Award and became her
biggest seller, prompting reprints of her earlier work. Welty continued
to garner awards, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her novel THE OPTIMIST'S
DAUGHTER, a revision of her work which was originally published
by The New Yorker. That May she also received a Gold Medal of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters, which was presented by Katherine
Porter. She even was honored with her own day by her home state
--- May 2, 1973 was declared Eudora Welty Day in Mississippi. Welty
won the National Medal for Literature in 1979, and THE COLLECTED
STORIES OF EUDORA WELTY, published by Harcourt Brace, was named
an American Library Association Notable Book in 1980. In June 1980
she was presented with the Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter
in a ceremony at the White House.
Over the past decade, Eudora Welty has written book reviews, introductory
essays, and prefaces from her home in Jackson, Mississippi. She
recently celebrated her 89th birthday.
ARTICLE
If
there is a grande dame of Southern women writers, then most certainly
the title would have to belong to Eudora Welty --- a woman whose
writing career is both long and distinguished. She published
her first book, A CURTAIN OF GREEN (a collection of short stories)
in 1941, and her last book, ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS, in 1984. In
between she wrote four novels, one of which won the Pulitzer prize
(THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER) and two additional collections of short
stories. She has also written numerous essays and articles
on the subject of writing.
Writing about her own work, Eudora Welty once said, "What I do in
writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart,
and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether
this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black
or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself."
It is, above all, the voice of the many characters that Eudora Welty
has created, that shines through her many stories and novels. Whether
she takes the point of view of a young woman dealing with the death
of her father (THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER), or an elderly woman telling
the story of her life to a traveling salesman (THE PONDER HEART),
Welty's characters speak in unique voices, true to their hearts
and souls.
This, as any writer knows, is incredibly difficult to do. Most
writers would tell you that to the extent they are able to create
characters with different voices, it is because they have come to
know many different people and had many different experiences. How
then did Eudora Welty, a woman who has rarely left her family home
in Jackson, Mississippi, manage to create so many different characters
that live in situations so different from her own? The
answer is simple --- she is one of the most creative women alive
today.
She credits her parents for instilling her with imagination and
a love of reading. In her memoir, ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS,
she writes, "I learned from the age of two or three that any room
in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be
read to. My mother read to me. She'd read
to me in the big bedroom in the mornings...She'd read to me in the
dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire...and
at night when I'd got in my own bed I must have given her no peace."
Her short stories are jewels --- each one a careful rendering of
a person and a place. In "Why I Live At The P.O.," a
young woman explains why she has had to leave her parent's home
and live at the post office in order to find her place in the world. "A
Worn Path" is the story of an elderly black woman trying to walk
to town to get medicine for her grandson. "Death Of A
Travelling Salesman" details a lonely man's search for love.
Her many novels explore the intricacies of human relationships. DELTA
WEDDING is a portrait of a Southern plantation family.
In THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, a young woman who has left the South
returns to New Orleans where her father is dying.
She once wrote, A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For
all serious daring starts from within." Her books are
living testimony to just how seriously she dared to look inward. Reading
her books is an unforgettable experience.
--- Judith Handschuh (JHScriba)
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
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