Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short-story writer, novelist, and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi, has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum.
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty (1879–1931) and Mary Chestina (Andrews) Welty (1883–1966). She grew up with three younger brothers: Edward Nickher Jefferson, Walter Allen Andrews and Logan Allen Howze. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Her family were members of the Methodist church. Her childhood home is still standing and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 prior to being delisted in 1986 because a dormer and deck were added to the roof.
Welty soon developed a love of reading, reinforced by her mother, who believed that "any room in our house, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read to." Her father, who worked as an insurance executive, was intrigued by gadgets and machines and inspired in Welty a love of mechanical things. She later used technology for symbolism in her stories and also became an avid photographer, like her father.
She attended Central High School in Jackson. Near the time of her high-school graduation, Welty moved with her family to a house built for them at 1119 Pinehurst Street, which remained her permanent address until her death. Wyatt C. Hedrick designed the Weltys' Tudor Revival-style home, which is now known as the Eudora Welty House and Garden.
Welty studied at the Mississippi State College for Women from 1925 to 1927, then transferred to the University of Wisconsin to complete her studies in English literature. At the suggestion of her father, she studied advertising at Columbia University. Having graduated during the Great Depression, she struggled to find work in New York.
Soon after Welty returned to Jackson in 1931, her father died of leukemia. She took a job at a local radio station and wrote as a correspondent about Jackson society for the Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal. In 1933, she began work for the Works Progress Administration. As a publicity agent, she collected stories, conducted interviews, and took photographs of daily life in Mississippi. She gained a wider view of Southern life and relationships; she would later draw from these experiences for her short stories. During this time she also held meetings with fellow writers and friends in her house, forming a group she called the Night-Blooming Cereus Club. Three years later, she left her job to become a full-time writer.
In 1936, she published "The Death of a Traveling Salesman" in the literary magazine Manuscript, and soon published stories in other notable publications including The Sewanee Review and The New Yorker. She strengthened her place as an influential Southern writer with the publication of her first book of short stories, A Curtain of Green. Her newfound success won her a seat on the staff of The New York Times Book Review as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to France, England, Ireland, and Germany. While abroad, she spent some time as a resident lecturer at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge She was the first woman to be permitted into the hall of Peterhouse College. In 1960, she returned to Jackson to care for her elderly mother and two brothers.
After the field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi Medgar Evers was assassinated, she published a story in The New Yorker, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?", from the first-person perspective as the assassin.
In 1971, she published a collection of her photographs depicting the Great Depression, titled One Time, One Place. Two years later, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Optimist's Daughter. She lectured at Harvard University and eventually adapted her talks as a three-part memoir titled One Writer's Beginnings. Throughout the 1970s, Welty carried on a lengthy correspondence with novelist Ross Macdonald, creator of the Lew Archer series of detective novels.
She continued to live in her family house in Jackson until her death from natural causes on July 23, 2001. She is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson. Her headstone has a quote from The Optimist's Daughter: "For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love."
While Welty worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, she took photographs of people from all economic and social classes in her spare time. Her photographs from the 1930s focused on Mississippi's rural poor and the effects of the Great Depression. Collections of her photographs were published as One Time, One Place (1971) and Photographs (1989). Her photographs inspired several of her short stories, including "Why I Live at the P.O.", which was centered on a woman she photographed ironing in the back of a small post office. Although focused on her writing, Welty continued to take photographs until the 1950s.
Welty's photographs were the subject of the National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibition Passionate Observer: Photographs by Eudora Welty which was on display October 27, 2003 to February 29, 2004.
Writing career and major works
Welty's first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman", was published in 1936. In May 1940 the literary agent Diarmuid Russell wrote to her, "John Woodburn of Doubleday's has suggested that I write to you to see if you might need the service of an agent. I suppose you know the parasitic way an agent works taking 10% of the author's takings. He is rather a benevolent parasite because authors as a rule make more when they have an agent than they do without one." Welty accepted Russell's offer; he represented her and was her friend for many years.
Her work attracted the attention of author Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the stories "Why I Live at the P.O.", "Petrified Man", and the frequently anthologized "A Worn Path". Excited by the printing of Welty's works in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, the Junior League of Jackson of which Welty was a member requested permission from the publishers to reprint some of her works. She eventually published over forty short stories, five novels, three works of non-fiction, and one children's book.
The short story "Why I Live at the P.O." was published in 1941 along with two others in The Atlantic Monthly. It was republished later that year in Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green. "A Worn Path" was also published in The Atlantic Monthly and A Curtain of Green. It is seen as one of Welty's finest short stories, winning the second-place O. Henry Award in 1941.
Welty's debut novel, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), deviated from her previous psychologically inclined works, presenting static, fairy-tale characters. Some critics suggest that she worried about "encroaching on the turf of the male literary giant to the north of her in Oxford, Mississippi—William Faulkner", and therefore wrote in a fairy-tale style instead of a historical one. Most critics and readers saw it as a modern Southern fairy-tale and noted that it employs themes and characters reminiscent of the Grimm Brothers' works.
Immediately after the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, Welty wrote Where Is the Voice Coming From?. As she later said, she wondered: "Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story—my fiction—in the first person: about that character's point of view". Welty's story was published in The New Yorker soon after Byron De La Beckwith's arrest.