by Stephen Enzweiler

The scope of Eudora Welty’s impact on Mississippi literature can hardly be measured. Considered the “literary voice and soul of the South,” the simple facts of her life often obscure her broad reach as an artist. Born Eudora Alice Welty on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Miss., Welty spent what she describes in her autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings as an idyllic childhood with her two brothers and doting parents. Reading was so highly valued in the Welty household that once when the place caught fire, her mother threw books by Dickens out the window before fleeing to safety.

She attended Central High School in Jackson, studied English at the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and then studied advertising at Columbia University Graduate School. She returned to Jackson during the Great Depression in 1931 and worked as a junior publicity agent with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). She wrote newspaper copy and took volumes of photographs for the WPA, which she displayed in many exhibitions over the years. Her photographic works were later compiled and published in One Time One Place (1978) and Photographs (1989). The WPA job allowed her to travel all over Mississippi. “It was the real germ of my wanting to become a real writer, a true writer,” she said in an interview. Finally, in June 1936, Eudora Welty published her first short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” in the small magazine Manuscript. She published her first collection of short stories in A Curtain of Green in 1941, which evoked images from her travels across rural Mississippi during her work with the WPA from 1933-36. Her first novel, Delta Wedding, was published in 1946, followed by the Natchez Trace fairy tale The Robber Bridegroom. In 1969, she won the Pulitzer Prize with her novel The Optimist’s Daughter.

Welty is widely regarded as the 20th century’s most gifted and masterful short story writer. She experimented radically with subject and form, often framing her stories in the same shutter-like fashion as she would her photographs. Her tonal range is also one of the most extraordinary – able to compose dark, lurid fiction in the “Southern Gothic” tradition as well as high-comic novels and stories that can be gut-bustingly funny. She wrote mainly along themes concerned with intimate and strange relationships within families, never addressing any social or cultural issues outside of those endemic to the immediate family. Such theme treatment is evident in her most famous short story Why I Live At The P.O. Yet, despite her literary skill, she always relied on her other artistic disciplines almost as a reference point to her writing, and often compared writing stories to the taking and developing of photographs.

She never married, claiming simply, “the subject never came up.” She won most of the major literary prizes for fiction; only the Nobel Prize eluded her. Such is the irony, considering Welty’s broad scope as a visual and literary artist; reading through her work reveals the most expansive artistic range of any 20th century American writer.

All of her novels are collected in a two-volume Library of America series: The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Delta Wedding (1946),The Ponder Heart (1954), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972); as well as collections of short stories: A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955). All these books attest to the extraordinary range and creative vision and gives the sense, as Welty herself said after reading The Collected Stories (1980), of “watching a negative develop, slowly coming clear before your eyes.”

Tennessee Williams	Ellen Gilchrist	John Grisham	Margaret Walker Alexander
Clifton Taulbert	Eudora Welty	Richard Wright	Shelby Foote
Jimmy Buffett	Greg Iles	William Faulkner	Jill Conner Browne
	Walker Percy	Willie Morris