A Daring Life

A Biography of Eudora Welty

Carolyn J. Brown

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781617032950
  9781617032950
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628467079
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Mississippi author Eudora Welty, the first living writer to be published in the Library of America series, mentored many of today's greatest fiction writers and is a fascinating woman, having lived the majority of the twentieth century (1909–2001). Her life reflects a century of change and is closely entwined with many events that mark our recent history. This biography follows this twentieth-century path while telling Welty's story, beginning with her parents and their important influence on her reading and writing life. The chapters that follow focus on her education and her most important teachers; her life during the Depression and how her career, just getting started, is interrupted by World War II; and how she shows independence and courage through her writing during the turbulent civil rights period of the 1950s and 1960s.

After years of caregiving and the deaths of all her immediate family members, Welty persevered and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter. Her popularity soared in the 1980s after she delivered the three William E. Massey Lectures to standing-room-only crowds at Harvard, and the lectures were later published as One Writer's Beginnings and became a New York Times bestseller. This biography intends to introduce readers to one of the most significant women writers of the past century, a prolific author who transcends her Mississippi roots and has written short stories, novels, and nonfiction that will endure for all time.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• One Life in Jackson: Eudora’s Early Years
• Two Eudora’s Education
• Three The 1930s: Finding Her Eye and Her Voice
• Four Before the War: Friends, Fellowship, and Early Success
• Five World War II: A Promising Career Interrupted
• Six The 1960s: Personal and Political Unrest
• Seven Grief and Recovery: The Optimist’s Daughter and One Writer’s Beginnings
• Eight The Importance of Friendship: Eudora’s Final Days
• Afterword Eudora Welty’s House
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1 Eudora Welty’s Artwork
• Appendix 2 Chronology of Eudora Welty’s Life
• Appendix 3 Books by Eudora Welty
• Appendix 4 Major Adaptations of Eudora Welty’s Works
• Appendix 5 List of Honorary Degrees and Major Awards
• Abbreviations Used in the Notes
• Source Notes
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index