Eudora Welty (1909-2001). Biography and Creativity

Eudora Welty is so much associated with Mississippi in particular and the South in general that it may be surprising to learn that she was not the descendant of a long line of Mississippians; her parents were in fact relatively recent immigrants to that state at the time Welty was born. Her mother had been born and raised in West Virginia, her father in Ohio, but Welty herself grew up in the South and imbibed its sounds, sights, and smells in a way that allowed her to achieve, in her fiction, an incomparable feel for the place and its people.

Yet, Welty is no mere regionalist; as did many of the greatest writers of the 20th century (a number of them, as she was, born and bred in the South), she drew on a specific local habitation to deal with timeless human experiences, emotions, and concerns. She lived much of her life in a relatively small southern city, but her vision was both wide and deep.

Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi (the state capital). Her parents—Chestina Andrews Welty and Christian Webb Welty—had already lost one child at a very early age, and Welty’s own mother had come close to dying herself. These experiences undoubtedly helped lead to an especially close bond with her parents and her younger brothers, Edward and Walter (who arrived in 1912 and 1915, respectively). Welty’s mother and father seem to have enjoyed an unusually loving marriage; many of Welty’s earliest memories involve reminiscences of overhearing her parents talk in the gently intelligent tones that obviously helped shape Welty’s own voice and persona.

Having suffered loss and near-loss, her parents had a deep appreciation of each other and of their surviving children, and Welty’s accounts of her early life are full of recollections of parental devotion and self-sacrifice. Both parents valued learning, both were inveterate readers (although the father favored factual books while the mother leaned toward fiction), and both encouraged Welty’s own early enthusiasm for reading and writing. The house was brimming with books, which became some of Welty’s earliest friends.

Welty began first grade at Jefferson Davis Elementary School in January 1915, but by the time she was seven, she was diagnosed with a rapid heartbeat—a fact that meant she had to stay at home in her parents’ big bed, where she could read to her heart’s delight, watch life from an upstairs window, and, as evening drew on, listen to her mother and father talk after they thought she had fallen asleep. In Welty’s later words, I don’t remember that any secrets were revealed to me, nor do I remember any avid curiosity on my part to learn something I wasn’t supposed to—perhaps I was too young to know what to listen for. But I was present in the room with the chief secret there was—the two of them, father and mother, sitting there as one. . . . I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn of mind, the nature of temperament, of a privileged observer; and owing to the way I became so, it turned out that I became the loving kind. (862)

Welty’s self-analysis is astute, for the later observations embedded in her fiction rarely seem caustic or satirical; she regards most of her characters as she seems to have regarded (and been regarded by) her parents: with an innate curiosity, a charitable attentiveness, and a willingness to listen thoughtfully and see the best in others.

Reflecting upon her childhood, Welty recalled going on casual Sunday drives, taking long car trips back to West Virginia and Ohio, attending plays and concerts, going to movies, and (of course) visiting the library (Ford and Kreyling 951-952). Welty’s father’s position as an insurance company executive meant that the family lived a comfortable middle- class existence; Welty’s mother did not have to work (although she did sell milk from a cow she owned), and Welty herself enjoyed the emotionally secure life of a well-loved oldest child. Her artistic talents manifested themselves in various ways and won her various forms of recognition, including the publication of a childhood drawing in a children’s magazine in 1920, the winning of a jingle contest in 1921, the publication of sketches and poems in the newspaper of Jackson’s Central High School, and the publication of one of her drawings by the Memphis Commercial Appeal (Ford and Kreyling 952).

In fall 1925 she entered Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, where she planned to focus on writing; while there, she published fiction, poetry, and artwork in campus publications and met and befriended people from diverse sections of the state and was particularly struck by their varied accents. Another opportunity to expand her geographical and cultural horizons presented itself when she transferred in 1927 to the University of Wisconsin in Madison (known for its fine liberal arts program), where she studied literature and art and became particularly interested in the modern writers, especially William Butler Yeats. She graduated from Wisconsin (where she had unfortunately felt somewhat isolated) in 1929, having by now displayed talent as a poet, artist, photographer, and writer of fiction. Unfortunately, 1929 was also the year in which the United States entered the Great Depression—the huge economic collapse that darkened life for many Americans for much of the next decade.

Welty, on the advice of her ever-practical father, enrolled in 1930 in a one-year advertising program at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University in New York City; if she could not make a living as a creative writer, she could at least help support herself by using her various talents in pragmatic ways. Not long after she returned to Jackson in 1931, her beloved father was stricken with leukemia, and, despite the desperate efforts of his wife to save him, he passed away quite quickly. For the next few years Welty earned an income by fulfilling various responsibilities at a local radio station and by reporting the Jackson social scene for a Memphis newspaper.

It was in 1935, however, that she took a job that would have an especially important impact on her later career: She was hired by the Works Progress Administration (one of many federal programs designed to put people to work on useful projects during the depression) to travel Mississippi as a journalist and photographer. Welty’s experiences as a roving reporter gave her an even greater knowledge of her home territory than she had acquired already, and her duties as a photographer (concentrating mainly on regular folks and their daily lives) helped sharpen both her eye and her insight. By 1935 she was seeking a New York publisher for a collection her photos.

Although she was unsuccessful in that endeavor, some of the prints were publicly displayed in New York in 1936 and 1937. By this time, too, Welty had begun submitting her short stories for publication, meeting with success when a well-regarded literary magazine accepted one of her most noted works, “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” From this point on, she increasingly became known as a writer of fiction, and although her stories were often rejected when first submitted, they usually found publishers eventually and thus helped establish Welty’s growing reputation.

By 1938 one of Welty’s tales had been selected for inclusion in the important anthology (part of an annual series) titled The Best Short Stories 1938, and recognition and support had also begun to come Welty’s way thanks to the encouragement and support of such fellow authors as Katherine Anne Porter and Ford Madox Ford and such influential critical voices as Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. The latter pair edited a well-regarded journal known as the Southern Review, in which many of Welty’s stories first appeared.

They also eventually became the authors of one of the most widely used textbooks in the country (Understanding Fiction); the inclusion of Welty’s work in that book would enhance her national profile even further. In the meantime, however, her career in the late 1930s and early 1940s moved from one highlight to another. One of her works was selected for inclusion in The Best Stories 1939; another was chosen for republication in the prestigious O. Henry Prize Stories of1939. Yet another work appeared in The Best Stories 1940, and in the latter year Welty began a professional association (and close friendship) with the literary agent Diarmuid Russell, with whom she would work for many years and who would succeed in placing her work in many of the best (and best-paying) journals and magazines in the country.

In 1941 her first collection of stories (A Curtain of Green) appeared, followed quickly in 1942 by the publication of a novella (The Robber Bridegroom) and, in 1943, by another collection (The Wide Net, and Other Stories). By 1943 Welty had won a fellowship to the Yaddo writers’ colony in New York (1941), had earned a second-place finish in the O. Henry Memorial Awards for short fiction (1941), had won a highly sought-after Guggenheim Fellowship (1942), had won first prize in the O. Henry Memorial Awards (1942), and then had won first prize again in the same competition the very next year. Furthermore, and to no one’s surprise, one of her works was also included in The Best American Short Stories 1943. In little more than five years Welty moved from virtual obscurity to the front rank of fiction writers in the United States.

Welty’s productivity continued unabated in the years immediately preceding and following the end of World War II in 1945. By 1946, for instance, she had produced another novel (Delta Wedding), and in 1949 she not only published a critical work titled Short Stories (based on a lecture given in 1947 at the University of Washington) but also issued a new collection of short fiction, titled The Golden Apples.

Also in 1949 she learned that her Guggenheim Fellowship had been extended, and during much of the late 1940s she traveled widely, visiting (and staying for lengthy periods) in such places as San Francisco, New York, Ireland, and England. In 1951, in fact, she lectured at Cambridge University and spent further time in Ireland (where she had become friends with the noted author Elizabeth Bowen). In 1952 she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1953 her Selected Stories (introduced by Katherine Anne Porter) was published as part of the highly respected Modern Library series; and in 1954 her third novel, The Ponder Heart, was not only published but chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection (thus ensuring very healthy sales).

In 1954 Welty published The Bride of Innisfallen, and Other Stories, and in 1956 she attended a New York theatrical adaptation of The Ponder. Unfortunately, events in Welty’s personal life had now begun to take a darker turn: Her mother was increasingly frail (especially after eye surgery in 1955), and her brother Walter died in 1959. Welty herself had never married and never would, but she had an immense capacity for friendships that helped sustain her through the bleak times in her life.

Few people could have sustained the pace of productivity that Welty had set in the 1940s and 1950s, and Welty did not. Her work as a writer of short stories declined significantly in quantity (if not in quality) in the 1960s, but throughout the 1960s she gave lectures, wrote about fiction, and worked on various other writing projects. In 1970 she issued a novel titled Losing Battles that sold many copies, and in 1972 she published another novel (The Optimist’s Daughter), which earned her the Pulitzer Prize (one of the few awards she had not previously won). The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews appeared in 1978, and in the following year Welty won the National Medal for Literature.

In 1980 a large volume of her Collected Stories was published and won various significant awards, and in that same year Welty was presented with the presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. Her 1983 autobiographical lectures at Harvard University were quickly published as the best-selling book One Writer’s Beginnings, which soon won a number of important awards of its own. A collection titled Photographs appeared in 1989, A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews was issued in 1994, and in 1998 Welty received the major honor of seeing most of her writings published in two thick volumes as part of the prestigious Library of America series.

By the time she died of pneumonia on July 23, 2001, she had established a reputation not only as one of her country’s finest writers but also as a much-beloved human being, known for her personal kindness, generosity, and gentle spirit. The intellectual and moral values inculcated long ago by her loving parents had borne splendid fruit.