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Works by Eudora Welty

A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (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 the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955)
Losing Battles (1970)
One Time, One Place (1971/Photographs)
The Optimist's Daughter (1972/Pulitzer Prize)
The Eye of the Story (1978/Essays and Reviews)
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980)
One Writer's Beginnings (1984)
Photographs (1989)
A Writer's Eye: Collected Book Reviews (1994)

Suggested Biography:

One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty by Suzanne Marrs (2002/Louisiana State University Press)

Eudora Welty was the rare artistic polymath distinguished in each of her creative pursuits - photography, novelist, critic, and short story writer.

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, she was a life-long resident in the house her father built across the street from Belhaven College until her death in 2001. Her education included Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

Welty's strong sense of place in her fiction and photography was undoubtedly rooted in and fostered by her three-year stint with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) between 1933 and 1936. Through this government job she was able to travel extensively within Mississippi familiarizing herself with its terrain, people, dialects, and lore, all of which would find voice in her later fiction.

Her first published work was the short story "Death of a Traveling Salesman" in 1936, available now in "The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty." The plot is simple; a traveling shoe salesman loses his way in rural Mississippi and must ask to spend the night with a married couple in a desolate shotgun house.

Quickly, the mesmerizingly unique and colorful prose - "But he could not hear his heart - it was as quiet as ashes falling," "The pulse in his palm leapt like a trout in a brook," and "The bed had been made up with a red-and-yellow pieced quilt that looked like a map or picture, a little like his grandmother's girlhood painting of Rome burning" - overwhelms the imagination and draws one right into the scene, the time and place, of the story. Whether it is novel, short story, or essay, a Welty hallmark is the meshing of two seemingly disparate images into fresh and meaningful similes.

Momentary disconnectedness and silent confusion often permeate the thoughts of a Welty character. The salesman, Bowman, during a perfectly ordinary winter day inexplicably and suddenly becomes confused, "Where am I? He wondered with a shock. He took a bag in each hand and with almost childlike willingness went toward [the house]." And again later the sensation returned, "The wind used the open hall. He felt that he was in a mysterious, quiet, cool danger."

A sense of foreboding and chilly tension very subtly builds in the story and all the more effectively because everything appears, and is, routine and unremarkable. Both the salesman Bowman and the reader (for we are now thinking along with Bowman) begin to self-consciously worry and glance about over what may happen next. Here again is another Welty hallmark: we are drawn into the story to brood and ponder concurrently with the character.

Welty's sly sense of humor can always be found lurking about. While the couple and Bowman are sitting by the fire, "The dogs slept; one of them was having a dream." While the idea of a dog dreaming is imaginative and dryly humorous, possibly it was also Welty's tip-of-the-hat to the emerging trend of experimentation with voice in literature.

In a 1949 review of "Intruder in the Dust," Welty writes, "Faulkner has at once reexplored his world with his marvelous style that can always search in new ways." Exchange "Welty" for "Faulkner" in the quoted passage and it remains accurate and truthful for all of her fiction.

Miss Welty's memoir, "One Writer's Beginnings," is so engaging largely because it is written as a series of connected vignettes with Welty as one of the two central characters. The other main character is early twentieth century Jackson, Mississippi. Her descriptions remove the sepia-tint from the memories and evoke them in vivid color, the sounds take on an orchestral quality as the perfect background mood music, and the people, curious and fresh to the young Welty, seem as natural and familiar as if we were in the memory with Welty, watching her as a young girl.

Notoriously private, Welty did not welcome intrusions into her life. So it is a wonderful surprise to have the recently published "One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty" by Suzanne Marrs. Marrs was a close friend of Welty's for the last twenty years of her life, and had the opportunity to discuss her life and how it found form in her fiction. First, "One Writer's Imagination" is biography of the best kind - by a friend with a sensitive and critical eye. Secondly, it is a literary journey into the genesis of Welty's creativity and how her life found form in her art. Exceedingly insightful and well written, "One Writer's Imagination" sets a new standard in literary biography.

There has never been a time in the last five years when Welty has not been on my nightstand, dog-eared, underlined, marginalia-scarred. Every rereading is a revelation. I'm not sure the stories change, but I watch myself change in relation to them.