The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780156189217
• Notes: BUY WITH Faith, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and aid to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Influence: New

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

Product Details

• Fitness: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Self-confidence, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and benefit to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9780674639270

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

got nothing out of this
First of all, I don't think Welty's stature as a writer is now or ever has been such that a memoir was called for, but fine. The thing is only about 110 pages.

But reading this proved a total waste of time, at least for me. I just finished it, yet would be hard-pressed to name one interesting event or situation from the entire work. She does outline where she was living and when, and there are some characterizations of some relatives, but as for getting at the core of what made her want to write and how . . . this book has, believe it or not, little to say on that subject.

Try Maugham's "The Summing Up." Now THAT book was everything this one should have been, and by a far more able writer.

2010-08-19 (La Mancha and environs) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Not for Everyone
Welty has always interested me so I was thrilled to read her -- well, what a heck is this? autobiography, essay,? Yep, both.

Reading this book seemed as if I were sitting down for a conversation with Welty. What a treat. She truly comes alive here.

This book is certainly not for those who want a plot or action. This book does give the reader an idea of what life was like for the author growing up in the South early in the 20th century. It is quiet, thoughtful, and precious.

2010-04-22 (Dekalb, Illinois) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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

Product Details

• Notes: BUY WITH Self-confidence, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and checking to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9781883011543
• Proviso: New

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 | Writers Gone Wild (Hershey, PA USA) | Helpful Votes: 14 | 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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Eudora Welty : Stories, Essays & Memoir (Library of America, 102)

Description

"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

Thanks
Came in a timely manner. Nice book cover. I like having an older print of a southern great!

2010-07-12 (Timbuktu) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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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 | Writers Gone Wild (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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Delta Wedding

Description

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Customer Reviews

fine novel about an isolated southern family
Delta Wedding is one of only five novels that Eudora Welty wrote and may be her best.This novel about an isolated slightly aristocratic southern family is full of interesting characterization and dry humor.We really feel like we know the Fairchilds after completing the book. The perspective of the young cousinLaura who comes fromJackson to the wedding is important and it gives depth. At times the book rambles and there are dead spots but overall a good piece of literature

2010-04-29 | tdlockwood (lINCOLN NE) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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uninspired
this novel is tired, uninspired, at the same time full of life and lifeless. Boring is the best word. You have to CARE about the characters, the plot, the situations, the conflicts, the setting (as set by the author), else the novel fails. And this one fails miserably. Grossly overrated.

2009-09-13 (memphis tennessee) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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boring and seemingly endless
This book was recommed to me in an online discussion group for classics, so I ordered it and looked forward to reading it. However, I never really got into it, I tried very hard several times, there are hardly any books I have not finished but with this one I just couldn't make myself read on. There are endless descriptions of what various members of the Fairchild family think and do during a long hot week. The style varies, depending on which persons thoughts we are following, but the thoughts are so boring and the writing doesn't help either. After about 100 pages I gave up and I couldn't even think of someone who I could give this book to.

2009-04-04 (Germany) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 1

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Delta Wedding
I had always wanted to read something by Eudora Welty, and this book cured me of that. What a confusing bunch of characters--one didn't know if they were white or black--young or old. The one bright spot in the book was her very descriptive language.

2006-11-09 (Arlington, TX USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Southern Lit at its Best
Welty has a way with words that is unlike any other American author. Delta Wedding is one of those "typical" Welty books that delivers passages that you have to reread several times because they are so evocative of time, place or spirituality.

DW is set at Shellmound, the Fairchild's plantation in the Mississippi Delta, aka cotton country. Laura McRaven, a cousin to the Fairchilds' travels by train from Jackson to Fairchild and is both overwhelmed by her huge family of cousins, aunts and uncles, and lured to be accepted by them. Laura's mother had recently passed away, and she expects to be treated special as a result. Other than her first greeting by her Aunt Ellen (the matriarch of this enormous family) she is pretty much left to fend for herself. Sometimes this proves too much for her, but by the end of the novel it seems that Laura fits right in with the rest of the Fairchilds.

One theme in particular that I liked about the book is that of the view of the outsider. Laura is an outsider who both wants to be inside and remain outside. She likes her "special-ness" by being an orphan and not being part of the Fairchild clan, but she desperately wants to be part of something grand, and the Fairchilds seem like a good place to start. Ellen, who married Battle Fairchild, is from Virginia and is seen as snooty even though she is thoroughly in love with the people around her. Welty does such a wonderful job of showing someone who is so overwhelmed by her life that she can't seem to react with enthusiasm--it's as if she's a piece of drift wood in the Yazoo River. Then there is Troy Flavin who is the bride groom of the story. Not only is he from another part of Mississippi where there are hills, but he is the overseer for the plantation--he is doubly outside. He looks different than everyone else, too. Unfortunately, we don't get to see the world from Troy's perspective other than in the few statements he makes about his mother and her quilting.

I enjoyed reading DW, though I have to admit I wished it were a little shorter. I felt myself being overwhelmed by the huge cast of characters. I still don't know how many children Battle and Ellen have, and I found myself wondering who some minor characters were upon their reintroduction to the story. That said, Welty has such a talent for a turn of phrase or for the absurd, that I found myself laughing out loud and thoroughly enjoying this book.

2006-10-31 (Hattiesburg, MS) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 4

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Eudora Welty: A Biography

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780156030632
• Shape: USED - Very Good
• Notes: BUY WITH Assurance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and aid to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

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Customer Reviews

A Different Presentation--
There are terrific reviews already on this site, and I can add little to what has already been said. I've been a Welty fan since discovering her work 40 years ago, and have a reply from her from many, many years ago when I wrote her a rather gushing fan letter in grade school.

I suppose that, like many Welty fans, I concentrated on her work. I'd read peripherally about her friendship with Porter and others, and I've enjoyed her photographic work. I'd also read One Writer's Beginnings. However, this work goes much deeper into Miss Welty's personal life than I'd been exposed to before. Who can say what's tragic or sad in another's life? We all create our existence to different muses.

I was delighted to find this book, and appreciate Ms. Marrs's scholarship.

2008-04-08 | johnrktx@sbcglobal.net (Lake Jackson, Texas USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Saint Eudora
I like Suzanne Marrs' book but it is less a conventional biography than an annotated account of every social visit and trip abroad taken by Eudora Welty during her eighty plus years of living.

Welty seemed to enjoy her reputation as an outsider artist, and from her Mississippi roots she took strength, but she sure was connected to the bigtime power brokers of New York and London. No wonder her career took off so early. If your best friends were Mary Lou Aswell, the premiere fiction editor of the day, and oh, William and Emmy Maxwell, the NEW YORKER fiction editor and his wealthy wife, your career would skyrocket too. She won them all over with a winning combination of direct honesty, Southern charm, a real curiosity about the lives of others, and a nose for showing up all the right parties. Marrs shows us a Welty obsessed as Paris Hilton with making the rounds and being seen everywhere, and if you took out all the parties, dinners, and chic foreign travel, this giant biography would be about 80 pages. Elizabeth Bowen told British readers that DELTA WEDDING was "new" and "great," didn't mention their deep friendship. As one reads the book the spectacle of one hand washing the other, of sheer log rolling, is a living thing, frightening in its implications. First Welty created her own career, then it seemed to take over

And sad, sad, sad! If you credit Marrs' reading of Welty's life, she spent years pining after a man who turned out to be gay, and then when she was an old lady she fell in love with a fellow novelist, one married to yet a third. Pining away after Ross Macdonald (Ken Millar), she didn't care what people thought. She would give his books favorable reviews in the NEW YORK TIMES, why not? They dedicated books to each other and played out their celebrity romance in public, a mutual admiration society people enjoyed observing the way they liked to see Agatha Christie married to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, as two orders of celebrity drawn to each other like iron filings to a magnet. Was Millar in love with Welty? He told Reynolds Price he was. However, Marrs is big on "perhaps" (a word used over two hundred forty times in her biography) and it's hard to pin her down. The thrust of Marr's biography is to utterly destroy what's left of the reputation on Margaret Millar, the brilliant crime writer Ross Macdonald stayed married to. It's as if I was writing a biography of Angelina Jolie and felt compelled to obliterate poor Jennifer Aniston by concentrating solely on her bad habits and not on her possibly hurt feelings. When Welty hears the news that Margaret Millar has finally died, her response is terse and grim. "'Thank you for the information,' was Eudora's only reply."

Marrs, an academic working in Mississippi loved Eudora herself and by her own admission became one of her best young friend. And hence she might be chary of saying anything analytical or remotely critical about Welty. Unseemly is the number of pages she spends demolishing a previous biographer who had the temerity to call Welty "homely." It's pathetic that Marrs should have found it necessary to insist on Welty's good looks. I'm sorry, but if Ann Waldron's book may have suffered from a lack of cooperation from Welty's friends, at least it tried to penetrate the surface of America's best loved author. Too many friends will obscure the real subject of a biography, as well as too little. The one place where Marrs' book is compelling is in the slow, detailed analysis of Welty's last 30 years and how she wound up in a nightmare of being unable to write fiction. Surrounded by sycophants and scholars who, by the 1970s, had established a Eudora Welty industry, she lived in a state of denial, accepting by Marrs' count 39 honorary degrees in part, or so it seems, to reassure herself that she was universally adored. She had trouble saying no, and she'd go to the opening of an envelope. It was a terrible waste, and yet, what else could she do to find a scrap of happiness? She had to know people loved her. Scholars and helpers wound up keeping her name in the public eye by compiling new books of her own writings, publishing limited editions of her juvenilia, having her sign limited edition copies, and arranging for numerous TV interviews.

Occasionally Marrs lets the "beloved" mask slip and shows us glimpses of what might have been the real Welty. Her unexplained hatred of Martha Gellhorn--that "phony"--is one such opening. Or when Bill Maxwell, exasperated by Welty's whining, asks her how she could possibly be "broke" when she has a musical running on Broadway. Marrs has an empathic, eccentric style of her own, given to oratorical repetition. "This is not to say that Eudora had become a pacifist. She had not." Sometimes she seems to have an axe to grind herself. What's the point in demonizing the late Norma Brickell, for example, referring to her offhandedly, without a single citation, as a "notoriously dominating personality"? Could it be that Eudora resented Norma for having married Herschel Brickell, one of Welty's platonic boyfriends? If so, why not say so? Norma Brickell is unjustly maligned here and no one is going to speak up on her behalf. It wasn't Norma who voted against Eudora getting her nth Guggenheim--no, it was Herschel, "because, as he put it, "Them as has gits."

I hope that Marrs will devote her energies on Welty's behalf to the extent of preparing editions of the two abandoned novel projects that caused her idol so much suffering, the novel called "Nicotiana" or "The Last of the Figs," and the 70s rape revenge tale she refers to as "The Shadow Club." It would be a shame indeed if none of this material was made available to Welty's vast public. Look how Hemingway's estate authorized the publication of novel after novel, after Hemingway's suicide. Spruced up and with forewords by Richard Ford or Reynolds Price, we'd have a new couple of Welty bestsellers on our hands.

2006-12-12 (San Francisco, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 4

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Woman of the World Models Vigorous Aging
Solid research by a top Eudora Welty scholar is coupled here with close friendship in the last 15 years of Welty's long life. Suzanne Marrs friendship with Welty gave her unparalleled access to papers and a wide circle of Eudora Welty's friends.

In addition to the text there is a delightful section of 16 pages of photos ranging from Welty's childhood through old age--including a few she took herself.

Welty emerges from the pages of Marrs' biography as a woman engaged in the world--not sheltered from it as the popular myth of her life suggested. Even during the years of her so-called Writer's Block, she traveled widely and worked hard to craft and deliver speeches at colleges and universities that are later gathered into essays.

I was particularly touched by the passages relating to her involvement in taking care of her mother in old age and of how she strove--ultimately not for publication--to transform her pain at Ken Millar's (aka Ross Macdonald) Alzheimer's.

Although she grieved as close friends died, Eudora Welty also seems a wonderful model for vigorous aging as she kept active, involved, tried new things, and kept a cadre of acquaintances of all ages in her orbit.

--Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

2006-06-14 | riehlife.com, Village Wisdom for the 21st Century (St. Louis, MO) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 5

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Wonderful!
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909 and died July 23, 2001. She was a Southern woman and that simple fact was what initially brought her to my attention so many years ago. I so enjoy the Southern writer. And Eudora Welty is no exception. Welty is a critically acclaimed writer of essays, short stories and novels. Hers are the stories that I return to every so often, always finding something new in them.

Welty's 1984 memoir One Writer's Beginning was her own personal life account. And while that was interesting it is this biography that seems to fill in the blanks with substance; probably because the author had a distance Welty didn't. What I found most interesting is the author's ability to humanize this icon of literature. Welty was first and foremost a woman who though she had an extreme talent, enjoyed humor, loved deeply (even though she never married), had numerous friends (many who were writers), loved her mother (whom people thought dominated Welty) and thought of New York as her second home.

Welty was definitely not the "old maid" some thought she was. She fell in love with a man who cared for her but also was interested in men. She then lost in love with a married man who was stricken with Alzheimer's. But it was the long-term relationship with Kenneth Millar (detective fiction writer Ross Macdonald) that will make your heart skip a beat. They met at the Algonquin Hotel and corresponded with each other twice each month. They only spent a total of six weeks together over the years but they always believed that fate brought them together.

I enjoyed the small items in this book: that Welty admired Langston Hughes's poetry and that osteoporosis took six inches from her five-foot-ten height. Especially touching are the memories of the relationship with Ken Millar.

Marrs book is a complete, considerate and grand account of the life of an important American literary icon. It is a book that I will revisit just like her body of work. Armchair Interviews says her work, like her biography is something to be read, reread and savored.

2006-03-17 (Minneapolis, MN) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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Putting Substance to a Life
There seems to be something provincial about any writer that lives in Mississippi. They cannot be viewed as normal people. When they are female, far from beautiful, remain unmarried, somewhat sequestered, a name like Eudora, and live with their mother, the image comes unbidden of a demure Southern Lady, incapable of expressing emotion, if they have any. Eudora Welty fit this image perfectly, and because she did it is too easy to dismiss her writing as worthless.

Then you look at the prizes:Pulitzer, National Book, eight (yes 8) O. Henry's, National Medal of Literature, Medal of Freedom. There had to be something more behind the image, something of life to give the understanding for such insight.

Ms. Marrs biography does an excellent job of giving life to Eudora Welty. That she considered New York her alternate home. That she was for integration in a segregationist South. That the loves in her life happened to be unavailable, but that they indeed were there.

Ms. Marrs book provides a view of Eudora Welty that rounds out her life in a most plesant way.

2005-09-13 | Gunny (Winnemucca, NV) | Helpful Votes: 9 | Rating: 5

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