Eudora Welty, 1909-2001
The Optimist's Daughter
Background
- Born in Jackson, Mississippi and made her life-long home there.
- Educated at Mississippi State College for Women and University of Wisconsin. Also
studied advertising at the Columbia University School of Business (1930-31).
Career
- Mississippi, the characteristic locale for most of her fiction.
- Early work included doing publicity for the WPA, journalism, and painting and
photography as modes of aesthetic expression.
- In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, received the William Dean Howells Medal (1955), the
Gold Medal for Fiction of the Naitonal Institute of Arts and Letters (1972), the National
Medal for Literature (1980) and two Guggenheim Fellowships (1942, 1949).
Major Writings
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941)
The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943)
The Robber Bridegroom (1942)
Delta Wedding (1946)
The Golden Apples (1949)
The Ponder Heart (1954)
The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955)
Losing Battles (1970)
The Optimist's Daughter (1972)
The Eye of the Storm: Selected Essays and Reviews (1977)
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980)
One Writer's Beginnings (1984)
The Shoes Bird (1993)
Critical Sources and Reviews
- Contempory Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 32; Contemporary Literary
Criticism, Vols.1 (1973), 2 (1974), 5 (1976), 14 (1980), 22 (1982), 33 (1985); Concise
Dictionary of American Literary Biography, Vol. 5: The New Consciousness: 1941-1968;
Conversations with Writers II; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook (1987).
All Gale publications.
- Conversations with Eudora Welty, ed. by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, 1984.
- Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, ed. by Peggy whitman Prenshaw, 1979
- Eudora Welty: Modern Critical Views, ed. by Harold Bloom et al.
- Eudora Welty, Ruth Vande Kieft, 1962
- Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty's Fiction, by Gail L.
Mortimer.
- Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work, Noel Polk
Note: A Eudora Welty website is currently under construction by the same group
that created the Walker Percy Internet Literary Site.
