Eudora Welty: Who was she

A. Eudora Welty - who died following a bout of pneumonia on 23 July 2001 - was perhaps the most discreetly eminent of the 20th century's great American writers. She became famous for her short stories and novels set mainly in her native Mississippi, and, together with such writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne porter and Carson McCullers, she chronicled the Deep South through a period of great social change.

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Although she did not belong to a Southern 'school' of writers as such, she had an ability to use regional sentiment as metaphor for universal human experience, and as a result she was often compared with other Southern writers. She was praised by critics, fellow writers and musicians for her vivid imagery and shrewd dialogue, which brought the South to life.

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Q. What was her background
A. Born on 13 April 1909, Welty grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and, after periods away, lived there in the family house almost permanently from 1931 until her death. She never married and once told the New York Times in an interview that marriage 'never came up'. Welty attended the Mississippi State College for Women before graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. She also studied advertising at the Columbia University School of Business.

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Q. When did she start to write
A. Welty's interest in fiction writing began when she worked as a publicist for Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration between 1933 and 1936. The job took her throughout Mississippi to chronicle Depression-era life in interviews and photographs of ordinary people. She won her first of five O. Henry Memorial Contest awards for short-story writing in 1941. Two years later, she garnered critical acclaim for her first published collection of stories, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Her first novel was Delta Wedding in 1946, followed by The Golden Apples in 1949. The Ponder Heart came five years later.

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Q. What else did she write
A. Her other books include The Bride of Innisfallen, a collection of short stories, and Losing Battles. The Ponder Heart and another novel, The Robber Bridegroom, were also turned into Broadway plays. The Optimist's Daughter, a tale about the ordeals of a woman whose widowed father marries someone much younger than herself, brought her the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1973. The acclaim this brought was seen as a fitting accolade to her long and vibrant literary career. She also received the prestigious American Book Award for fiction.

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Welty was also celebrated for her photography, and in May 2000 she published her last book, Country Churchyards, an album of the photographs she took while working for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.

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Q. What did she say about her writing
A. To quote from her autobiography, On Writing, she said: 'The story and its analyses are not mirror-opposites of each other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what the writer is learning to do.'

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Fiction, she stated, provided her with the most productive tool for analysing human personality.

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Q. Anything to do with the e-mail programme Eudora
Strangely, yes. The designer of the Eudora software, Steve Dorner, named his programme after her, because he was inspired by one of her short stories Why I Live At the P.O.

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For more detailed information on the life and works of Eudora Welty, try
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/welty_eudora/
and
http://www.gsu.edu/~wwwewn/

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By Simon Smith