The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

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• ISBN13: 9780156189217

Description

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Customer Reviews

availability
I was very pleased with the prompt delivery of my purchase. I went to three bookstores and it was not available. I went to Amazon and not only available but the price of the book was less than the bookstores. I will order from this company in the near future.

2009-12-09 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Amazing
Absolutely compelling stories about the South. What a brilliant and lovely writer. Honest and captivating.

2009-08-14 (Atlanta, GA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Amazing Analogies and Characterizations
Welty is a short story writer that I have tried very hard to like. I'm still culling through her large opus of stories and do have a couple of favorites. I liked A Curtain of Green, but to me this story did not seem typical of her. I enjoyed her most frequently anthologized work "Why I Live at the P.O." It is funny and cleverly written. But still I find that not many of her stories "slam" me the way her promotor and good friend Katherine Ann Porter's work does. Welty is, however, an amazingly adept story teller and undeniable a master of analogy and characterization. I keep looking for something in her stories that make them memorable for me, and I just can't seem to find it. I grew up near the geographical area in which most of her stories are set and can vouch for their authenticity and the accuracy of the dialects and customs of that region. In rating her story collection, I'd like to give her 4 stars for her brilliant writing skills and 3 for my personal enjoyment of the stories. I like 'em, but don't love 'em.

2009-01-22 (Cincinnati, OH United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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Wonderful reading.
Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty: a delicious book, perfect for reading during the hot months of summer.

2008-07-28 (Upstate New York USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Don't Neglect Eudora Welty
If you think, after reading one of Eudora Welty's short stories, that you have a pretty good idea of what that story is about, I would urge you to read it at least a second time before committing to your opinion about it. After reading each of the first three stories I read from this collection, it was pretty clear that I had struck upon a brilliant writer, but it was only after re-reading each of them, that I began to realize just how brilliant a writer she was. "Why I Live at the P.O." is a first person account of a woman known only as Sister, who rants for eleven pages about her family's mistreatment of her. You'll get caught up in the swirl of energy Welty creates, but it may take a second reading to get at the story beneath the story. The same is true for "A Memory," a five-page retrospective narrative with a dreamy and sweet veneer. Just below the skin of the story, though, is another, less sweet story. In her own words, when Welty writes, she tries to "enter into the mind, heart, and skin" of her characters. In "Where is the Voice Coming From," Welty gets inside the body of the killer of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader. When she learned about his murder, she immediately felt, "with overwhelming directness: Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place." She continues, "...about that character's point of view, I felt, through my shock and revolt, I could make no mistake." If you're interested in great short fiction and the craft beneath it, don't neglect Eudora Welty.

2008-03-06 (Forest Park, IL United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Eudora Welty : Stories, Essays & Memoir (Library of America, 102)

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"Stories, Essays, and Memoir" contains all of Welty's collected short stories, her first book, "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (1941), stories based on her travels, and the ever-popular memoir, "One Writer's Beginnings" (1984).

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It's small wonder that the Library of America chose Eudora Welty as the first living (at that time) author published in this prestigious series. Welty was the kind of writer people routinely call "an American institution." But don't let the sweet white-haired-old-lady image fool you: Welty's work is anything but benign. For more than 50 years, Welty spoke with a fierce and uncompromising literary voice. Or, rather, voices: the stories collected in this volume feature a dizzying array of characters, each of whom seems to whisper directly into the reader's ear. From the toxic rage of "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" to the jazzy rhythms of "Powerhouse," these tales blaze with intensity and a comic energy that's both gentle and fierce. Even that bane of junior-high-school speech tournaments everywhere, "Why I Live at the P.O.," benefits from rereading; as far as this brand of down-home farce goes, Welty does it better than anyone. Bringing together the contents of Welty's four short-fiction collections, this Library of America volume also includes several essays as well as Welty's very fine 1984 memoir, "One Writer's Beginnings." In it she speaks of connections, continuities, the way both her fiction and her experiences emerged gradually into focus over time:

...suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect.

This volume is that light thrown back; the full import of Welty's enormously influential work is perhaps apparent only now, in this substantial and rewarding retrospective of her career. --Mary Park

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Customer Reviews

What more can be said?
The first reviews of this collection pretty much sum this volume up. The only thing I can add is that if this collection is not in your library, if you have not read Welty, you are certainly the poorer for it.

2010-02-17 (WNC) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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One gem after another
Reading these stories, I fell in love with Eudora Welty's writing. A completely original voice, with a blend of grace, humor and courage that you simply don't find anywhere else--particularly among today's writers. While most of the stories play in the south, probably my favorite is "The Bride of the Innisfallen," which plays in England and Ireland. I didn't fully understand it the first time I read it, but I was sufficiently intrigued that I immediately read it again (something I rarely do) and was completely blown away. American writing doesn't get any better than this.

2009-11-20 (New Jersey) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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The Great Southern Writer Who Wasn't Southern
Each new volume from The Library of America, the non-profit publisher that has become the de facto literary hall of fame, is a cause for celebration. Its goal of preserving in an enduring format the best fiction and non-fiction is a significant bulwark against the encroaching tides of cultural relativism that attempts to render any value judgments meaningless, as well as a consumer society that insists that if it ain't new, it ain't good.

In the case of Eudora Welty, we're given two volumes: a collection of five novels ("The Robber Bridegroom," "Delta Wedding," "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles" and the Pulitzer-winning "The Optimist's Daughter"), and another of her essays, her memoir "One Writer's Beginnings" and her short stories. From her first published short stories, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in 1937, to her last novel in 1972, Welty captures with her highly readable style and sharp eye and ear the varieties and eccentricities of Southern life.

But while the South claims Welty as one of its own, she may not necessarily return the favor. Teh cause is both geographic and a matter of choice. Although she was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1909 and lived there all her life, her father was from Ohio and her mother from West Virginia, a state created by the Civil War that went for the Union. This isn't Margaret Mitchell we're talking about here.

Then, in her essay "Place in Fiction," she stresses that while it is important for a writer to capture the feeling of an area, it is not the paramount goal in fiction:

"It is through place that we put out roots ... but where those roots reach toward ... is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding."

But what pedigree does not provide, her environment probably did, for her work contains those elements poularly associated with Southern fiction. "Delta Wedding" celebrates the Southern family through the sprawling Fairchild clan and its passel of sons, daughters, cousins, aunts, great-aunts, nieces and nephews, all involved in each others' lives to a degree rarely seen today.

Many of her stories revolve around characters marginalized by society, struggling to exist and reach out to others: the simple Lily Daw who tries to evade the determination of the town's ladies to either marry her off or send her to the asylum; the generous, slightly retarded Daniel Ponder who would give away everything he has at the drop of a hat; the demented Clytie in "A Curtain of Green," who rushes about looking in people's faces until, seeing her reflection in a barrel of rainwater, dives in and drowns.

Eudora Welty was a sharp, perceptive writer, and her enshrinement by the Library of America is most welcome.

2006-12-20 (Hershey, PA USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Creations of a unique voice.
"Listening," "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice," Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography "One Writer's Beginnings," the concluding entry in this collection, one of the two Library of America compilations dedicated to her work. And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty's compact autobiography is notable both because it allows a rare glimpse into the celebrated writer's otherwise fiercely protected private life and it illustrates the roots from which sprang such extraordinary protagonists as "The Ponder Heart"'s Edna Earle and Daniel Ponder, Miss Eckhart and the Morgana families in "The Golden Apples" and, of course, the anti-heroes of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Optimist's Daughter," Judge McKelva, his second wife Fay and (most importantly) his daughter Laurel.

A native and - with minimal exceptions - lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi, Welty received her first introduction to storytelling as a listener; and early on, learned to sharpen her ears not only to a story's contents but also to its narrator and its protagonists' individual nature: "[T]here [never was] a line read that I didn't hear," and "any room ... at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to," she notes in "One Writer's Beginnings," adding that the discovery that all those stories had been written by someone, not come into existence of their own, not only surprised but also severely disappointed her. Equally importantly, family visits to relatives brought out the born observer in her; each trip providing its own lessons and revelations, each a story onto itself - the seed from which later grew the literary creations collected in this compilation and its companion volume. At the same time, her father's interest in technology introduced her to photography as a means of capturing visual impressions, one moment at a time; and when traveling around Mississippi as an agent for a state agency (her first job) she learned to use that camera as "a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know" and discovered that "to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was [then] the greatest need I had" ("One Writer's Beginnings:" Not surprisingly, her photography was published in several collections which have found much acclaim of their own.)

Thus, from early childhood on, Eudora Welty not only had a keen sense of the world around her but also, of words as such: of their existence as much as the interrelation between their sound, physical appearance and the things they stand for. Encouraged by her mother, a teacher, and over her father's worries (he considered fiction writing an occupation of dubitable financial promise and, worse, inferior to fact because it was "not true") Welty embarked on a writer's path which would lead her to award-winning heights and to a reputation as one of the South's finest writers, with as abounding as obvious comparisons to fellow Mississippian William Faulkner in particular; a literary debt she acknowledged when she wrote that "his work, though it can't increase in itself, increases us" and "[w]hat is written in the South from now on is going to be taken into account by Faulkner's work" ("Must the Novelist Crusade?", 1965). The Library of America dedicated two volumes to her work; one containing her novels, the other - this one - her short stories, essays (some, like her autobiography, based on a series of lectures) and her autobiography.

An approach that Welty developed early on was to consider the publication of her stories in periodicals merely a step towards each story's final shape, and she generally revised her stories before including them in collections. This compilation brings together all her short stories in the versions intended to be final by Welty herself: the 1941 edition of "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (her first short story collection), the 1943 edition of "The Wide Net and Other Stories" and the 1949 edition of "The Golden Apples" - each collection suffered substantial editorial revisions in subsequent publications. Included are also two stand-alone short stories ("Where is This Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators"), the first one inspired by the 1963 murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers and revised by Welty over the telephone after having been accepted by "The New Yorker," to avoid a potentially prejudicial effect of its original ending on the then-impending trial.

A keen observer, Welty was also a writer endowed with a sharp sense of humor and satire, and with the gift to brilliantly use location, localisms, accents, patterns of speech and customs to make a point. Not a single word is wasted: "Marrying must have been some of his showing off - like man never married at all till *he* flung in," we're told about King MacLain in the opening story of "The Golden Apples," "Shower of Gold." And you don't have to learn anything more about the man, do you? Equally as instructive on Welty's writing are the eight essays included in this collection, all taken from the 1978 compilation "The Eye of the Story" and dealing with particular aspects of her own fiction as much as, more generally, with "Place in Fiction" (1954) and the fiction writer's role ("Writing and Analyzing a Story," originally published in 1955 under the title "How I Write" and substantially revised for its inclusion in "The Eye of the Story" and "Must the Novelist Crusade?").

"There is no explanation outside fiction for what its writer is learning to do," Eudora Welty maintained in "Writing and Analyzing a Story;" explaining that each story references only the writer's vision at the moment of the creation of that story, and the creative process itself: nothing that can be "mapped and plotted" but a product taking shape in the process of creation itself, giving each story a unique identity of its own. And while her fiction, alas, can no longer grow any more than Faulkner's, she has left us enough of those unique creations to cherish for a long time to come.

Also recommended:
Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America)
Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands (Library of America)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal Legacy Series)

2003-08-01 (from somewhere between California and Germany) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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An Essential
At the time of her death, Eudora Welty was widely regarded as America's single greatest living author. Although she produced several critically acclaimed novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, Welty achieved her greatest fame through mastery of that most difficult of all literary forms, the short story.

Welty's skill with short stories is amazing, for she possessed a talent that combined a remarkable ear for the spoken word, meticulous observation of physical world, and the truly mysterious ability to slip almost effortlessly into the very marrow of the characters she depicts. Her comic stories are perhaps best known to the public in general, but she is equally at home with provocative and unsettling material, and although her tales are most often firmly rooted in America's deep south they have a sense of humanity that transcends the limitations of purely regional literature.

In addition to stories previously collected under the titles A CURTAIN OF GREEN, THE WIDE NET, THE GOLDEN APPLES, and THE BRIDE OF THE INNISFALLEN, this Library of America publication also includes the independently published stories "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators," nine selected essays, and Welty's memoir ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS. A chronology of Welty's life up to 1996, textual notes, and general notes (including Katherine Anne Porter's introduction for A CURTAIN OF GREEN) are also included. This book (and its Library of America) companion, EUDORA WELTY: COMPLETE NOVELS) are essentials for any one who admires Welty's work and wishes to possess it in handy, collected form; those who have had limited exposure to Welty's work, however, might be better served by smaller collections.

2002-05-01 | GFT (Biloxi, MS USA) | Helpful Votes: 15 | Rating: 5

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Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America)

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• ISBN13: 9781883011543
• Term: NEW
• Notes: Mark New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Description

This two-volume collection reveals the singular imaginative power of one of America's most admired Southern writers. "Complete Novels" gathers all of Welty's longer fiction, from "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942) to her Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Optimist's Daughter" (1972).

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This Library of America volume gathers all the long fiction published by the beloved Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Throughout her long and storied career, Welty has been most famous, perhaps, for her short stories. But it's in her novels that she attempted some of her most ambitious and powerful creations: the idiosyncratic fable that is The Robber Bridegroom, drawing on legends, local history, folktale, and myth; the underrated, wickedly funny short novel The Ponder Heart; and Losing Battles, a familial epic 15 years in the making and begun in bits and pieces while Welty cared for her sick mother. In a strange inversion of the author's usual career trajectory, Welty's only attempt at a roman à clef came late in life, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Optimist's Daughter, the quiet, moving, largely autobiographical story of a woman coming to grips with her father's death. The novels alone earn Welty a place as one of the finest writers our century has produced; taken together with the Library of America companion volume, Stories, Essays, & Memoir, it's a body of work that William Maxwell calls "beyond human power of praising." Welty rarely strayed for long from the place of her birth, but her fiction is as capacious as the human heart itself. Like Faulkner, she has taken her own corner of Mississippi and made it encompass the world.

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Customer Reviews

What a writer!
Eudora Welty has a voice all her own, and the two Library of America volumes let you get inside her writing in a way that reading the books and stories individually somehow doesn't. The one disappointment in all of her writings was "Losing Battles"--despite the fact that, apparently, it was her most popular novel. I read about 200 pages of it before deciding, with real regret, that was indeed a losing battle to try to get into it. But thankfully, the other novels more than make up for it. "The Robber Bridgegroom" is a hilarious American fairy tale/tall tale that was even better the second time around, "Delta Wedding" is one of those sprawling books you get lost in and don't ever want to end, "The Ponder Heart" is another high-order hoot, and "The Optimist's Daughter" is flat-out one of the best American novels of the 20th century. What a writer!

2009-12-26 (New Jersey) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Mistress of Southern Fiction
Each new volume from The Library of America, the non-profit publisher that has become the de facto literary hall of fame, is a cause for celebration. Its goal of preserving in an enduring format the best fiction and non-fiction is a significant bulwark against the encroaching tides of cultural relativism that attempts to render any value judgments meaningless, as well as a consumer society that insists that if it ain't new, it ain't good.

In the case of Eudora Welty, we're given two volumes: a collection of five novels ("The Robber Bridegroom," "Delta Wedding," "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles" and the Pulitzer-winning "The Optimist's Daughter"), and another of her essays, her memoir "One Writer's Beginnings" and her short stories. From her first published short stories, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in 1937, to her last novel in 1972, Welty captures with her highly readable style and sharp eye and ear the varieties and eccentricities of Southern life.

But while the South claims Welty as one of its own, she may not necessarily return the favor. Teh cause is both geographic and a matter of choice. Although she was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1909 and lived there all her life, her father was from Ohio and her mother from West Virginia, a state created by the Civil War that went for the Union. This isn't Margaret Mitchell we're talking about here.

Then, in her essay "Place in Fiction," she stresses that while it is important for a writer to capture the feeling of an area, it is not the paramount goal in fiction:

"It is through place that we put out roots ... but where those roots reach toward ... is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding."

But what pedigree does not provide, her environment probably did, for her work contains those elements poularly associated with Southern fiction. "Delta Wedding" celebrates the Southern family through the sprawling Fairchild clan and its passel of sons, daughters, cousins, aunts, great-aunts, nieces and nephews, all involved in each others' lives to a degree rarely seen today.

Many of her stories revolve around characters marginalized by society, struggling to exist and reach out to others: the simple Lily Daw who tries to evade the determination of the town's ladies to either marry her off or send her to the asylum; the generous, slightly retarded Daniel Ponder who would give away everything he has at the drop of a hat; the demented Clytie in "A Curtain of Green," who rushes about looking in people's faces until, seeing her reflection in a barrel of rainwater, dives in and drowns.

Eudora Welty was a sharp, perceptive writer, and her enshrinement by the Library of America is most welcome.

2006-12-20 (Hershey, PA USA) | Helpful Votes: 12 | Rating: 5

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Greatest living southern writer
I began my acquaintance with Eudora Welty's works in college with One Writer's Beginnings and fell in love with the lyrics of her writing. I moved on to her short stories where I believe Ms. Welty surely shines brightest, but her novels are almost as wonderful. Very few people have the depth of insight into the mind and motivations of southerners that Eudora Welty has. She is right up there with William Faulkner. She has the gift of seeing and conveying the universal experiences of her decidedly regional cast of characters.

Since this is a collection of all of Ms. Welty's novels it is difficult to give a concise review. Suffice it to say that for reading pleasure you will not spend better money. The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize, but Losing Battles may be even better (the novel centers on all of the family stories told at a huge family reunion--great framing device for so many wonderful tales). The Robber Bridegroom is a southern fairy tale.

Eudora Welty is a giant of literature. This is a great Library of America collection. Buy it!

2001-06-14 (New Orleans, Louisiana USA) | Helpful Votes: 54 | Rating: 5

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One Writer's Beginnings (William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American C)

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• ISBN13: 9780674639270
• Notes: Brand name New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Get: NEW

Description

"Beguiling as autobiography and . . . profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write serious fiction. . . . In these few pages, Eudora Welty seems to have followed the trail . . . to the richness of her maturity with a gracious and warming clarity."--Los Angles Times Book Review. 17 halftone illustrations.

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Among the most beloved of American writers, Eudora Welty's stories and novels have entertained us for over half a century. Here, in her memoirs, she writes with her usual candor and grace about how a writer's sensibilities are shaped. As compelling as her stories, as witty as her personality, as finely honed as her fiction, Welty's account of her life is a powerful and fulfilling read.

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Customer Reviews

If you love writing, read this
Reviewers are correct in saying that this was not meant to be a how-to book about writing. I believe the book might be taken from several lectures she gave at Harvard rather late in life? In any case, the book will be greatly enjoyed partly because Welty is such a good writer that she could probably be captivating if she wrote about a trip to the grocery store.
I love to read about how great writers started out. What is their family background? What were their struggles? What motivated them? How did their writing develop? Who were their encouragers or discouragers? What were the hard lessons they learned? What things about the writing life did they enjoy most? Which were the most challenging? And on an on go my questions.
Welty does not disappoint. Though not exhaustively, she tells her story and the book is to be gradually savored, not rushed through in three hours. An excellent book.

2010-01-08 | Amazon author&seeyourselfinprint.com (North Port, Florida) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A Mississippi Writer
I purchased Eudora Welty's book because I am interested in writing and she is a Mississippi writer.

2009-11-16 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Took too long
I was not very satisfied with the procedure.
I had to wait more than a month to get my book.
I never got a confirmation from the seller about the purchase, only from amazon.
When I contacted them to inquire about my book, they did not answer me.
I got the book eventually,the quality was as stated, but it took too long.

2009-10-17 (California) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Capturing the Senses of a Delta Life
Originally envisioned as three lengthy lectures delivered at Harvard in 1983, this short autobiographical book presents an intimate portrait of the seminal influences--memories and emotions--upon one 20th century author. With tender and respectful poignancy Welty shares the development of her intuitive powers as she analyzes the Confluence--an important word for her--of the rivers of thought and motivation which shaped and colored her characters over her collective literary output. In both her short stories and novels her characters exhibit similitude, yet may claim their own motivations and struggles for independence on the printed page--in a world where human interdependence is almost mandatory. A very readable kaleidoscope of one writer's early Southern lifestyle.

2009-09-13 | PLUME45 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Important autobiography
Eudora Welty's short autobiography is interesting and revealing in itself, but also it was invaluable as an extra reading assignment for the students I am teaching in a course of southern writers. Eudora's writings, especially her short stories border on grim to darkest black. Her autobiography is positively sunny and positive. The contrast is fascinating.

2009-04-19 | jscott@kona.midcoast.com (thomaston, me United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Eudora Welty: Photographs

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• ISBN13: 9780878055296
• Prerequisite: NEW
• Notes: Stamp New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Description

The radiant world of Eudora WeltyÂ’s art is charged by a poignant and familiar beauty, and here in a stunning book of her photographs is a dazzling record of this writerÂ’s unique and special vision.

It is unusual–remarkable–for a major writer also to be an accomplished photographer. Eudora Welty is one of the very few whose great talent has been expressed in both photographs and fiction.

This book brings together in one volume about 250 representative photographs from the few thousand that she took during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. Although her cameraÂ’s view finder compresses much, like the frame in which she conceives her fiction, it finds elements that convey her deep compassion and her artistÂ’s sensibilities.

From the confines of her native Mississippi these photographs unfold the world of Eudora Welty’s art, reaching, extending, and exploring. In the Deep South of Depression times, when she began writing, she discovered the place into which she had been born and which would always be her subject. From here, as these photographs show, she approached and risked the outside world. From rural Mississippi to New Orleans, Charleston, New York City, and Yaddo, and then to Ireland, England, and the Continent Welty widened her vision and expanded her art. These photographs reveal that both in her fiction and in the pictures she took it has always been in place, in the special qualities of what is local, that she found her impulse. “I was smitten by the identity of place wherever I was,” she said in 1989, “from Mississippi on---I still am.”

The legions of appreciators of WeltyÂ’s photographs see in them the feelings and vision that are the hallmarks of her great literary art in such novels as Losing Battles and The OptimistÂ’s Daughter, in her memoir One WriterÂ’s Beginnings, and in her volumes of short stories.

This serves as a definitive book of WeltyÂ’s photographs, comprising pictures from her personal collection, from the repository of Welty materials at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and from One Time, One Place, an album of her Depression-era photographs published in 1972.

Included are Mississippi scenes and people, emblems of folklife, carnival signs and performers, photographs taken in Charleston, New Orleans, Mexico, New York City, Ireland, Paris, Nice, Italy, Wales, and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a significant group of WeltyÂ’s portraits of family members and friends.

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Customer Reviews

Incredibly Beautiful
This book is filled with beautiful photographs that show a profound respect for the dignity of each person photographed--rich or poor, black or white, old or young. Eudora Welty was truly a woman ahead of her time. As a current resident of Mississippi, the pictures have a special resonance.

2008-02-26 (Hattiesburg, MS) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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See What Welty Saw
Welty's tallent with the unspoken is clear as one turns each page. This book is as beautiful as it is haunting. I am originally from the delta, which makes these pages seem like a part of me. It is wonderful to see what Welty saw -- the folks who inspired her stories.

2005-10-07 (Tallahassee, FL) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A Fascinating Look at Pre-war Mississippi
This collection of photographs vibrantly brings to life a bygone era in Mississippi. As a former resident of the state Ms. Welty photographed, I found this book to be an indispensible document of a life now gone (for better and worse). The simplicity and beauty of the featured photographs move me almost as much as the author's fiction. While we do not remember Eudora Welty for her photographs, I find it hard to be disappointed with them; alas, I can only find fault with the volume's brevity. This book would be a wonderful addition to any collection.

2001-09-27 | Music Geek (New Orleans, LA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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A Fascinating Look at Pre-war Mississippi
This collection of photographs vibrantly brings to life a bygone era in Mississippi. As a former resident of the state Ms. Welty photographed, I found this book to be an indispensible document of a life now gone (for better and worse). The simplicity and beauty of the featured photographs move me almost as much as the author's fiction. While we do not remember Eudora Welty for her photographs, I find it hard to be disappointed with them. I can only find fault with the volume's brevity. This book would be a wonderful addition to any collection.

2001-09-27 | Music Geek (New Orleans, LA) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 4

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The Other Public Side of Eudora Welty
Most of us know Eudora Welty as a writer of Southern fiction, marked by regional dialect, mysterious characters, and absorbing stories. Ms. Welty's photography is another reflection of her sensitive, intuitive nature. She captures in images the essence of life in Mississippi just as she captured it later in her writings. The reproduction is not superlative, but one does get an adequate representation of her work and its intent. Those who know photography intimately and those with a passing interest will all find this book immensely satisfying.

2000-05-16 (Dripping Springs, TX USA) | Helpful Votes: 17 | Rating: 4

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On Writing (Modern Library)

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780679642701
• Notes: Trade mark New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Inure: NEW
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Description

Eudora Welty was one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary figures. For as long as students have been studying her fiction as literature, writers have been looking to her to answer the profound questions of what makes a story good, a novel successful, a writer an artist. On Writing presents the answers in seven concise chapters discussing the subjects most important to the narrative craft, and which every fiction writer should know, such as place, voice, memory, and language. But even more important is what Welty calls “the mystery” of fiction writing—how the writer assembles language and ideas to create a work of art.

Originally part of her larger work The Eye of the Story but never before published in a stand-
alone volume, On Writing is a handbook every fiction writer, whether novice or master, should keep within arm’s reach. Like The Elements of Style, On Writing is concise and fundamental, authoritative and timeless—as was Eudora Welty herself.

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Customer Reviews

Title should be "On Literary Criticism"
Eudora Welty was an icon of twentieth century literature. Her work reprinted here is straight out of my literary criticism classes of the sixties. All essays were originally published in the sixties and seventies. This book is useful for the student of literary criticism. It is NOT useful for the student of writing technique, characterization, short stories, plot development, use of place and time.

2002-12-11 (Florida, USA) | Helpful Votes: 20 | Rating: 3

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Not for Writers Only
It is unfortunate that most readers who make their way to this page will be writers for this collection of Eudora Welty's essays on the craft of writing is not just for writers.

Readers, too, will find wisdom and insight here. Wisdom to apply to their own lives. Insight into Welty's other works. That The Modern Library collected them is a gift in and of itself.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of "Harkening"

2002-11-05 | Author 'This is the Place,' 'Harkening,' 'Tracings' and 'The Frugal Book Promoter' (Los Angeles, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5

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