Eudora Welty
April 13, 1909 — Jackson, Mississippi
Eudora Alice Welty was an American short story writer and novelist whose acutely observed, richly humane portraits of Mississippi life established her as one of the preeminent voices in American Southern literature — earning her the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a place among the most finely crafted prose stylists of the twentieth century.
Mississippi Roots
Born on April 13, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty grew up in a family that valued reading and education. She attended Mississippi State College for Women, then transferred to the University of Wisconsin, and finally studied advertising at Columbia University. She returned to Jackson during the Depression and took a job with the Works Progress Administration traveling across Mississippi to document and photograph communities — work that gave her an intimate knowledge of her state's people and landscape that would sustain her fiction for a lifetime.
A Distinct American Voice
Welty's first collection, A Curtain of Green (1941), introduced a major voice with stories of extraordinary compression and attention — ordinary Mississippi lives rendered with compassion, irony, and an ear for the music of speech that rivals Mark Twain. She published four more story collections, five novels including The Ponder Heart and Losing Battles, and the autobiographical memoir One Writer's Beginnings (1984), which became a surprise bestseller and is among the most eloquent accounts of a literary vocation ever written. Her Pulitzer Prize came in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter, a novel about grief and family with the unsparing clarity of her best work.
Did You Know?
Welty lived her entire adult life in the house in Jackson, Mississippi where she grew up — she never left. She wrote at a desk in her upstairs bedroom, cut up her manuscript drafts with scissors, rearranged the sections by pinning them to a board, and continued revising obsessively until the last possible moment. The house is now a National Historic Landmark and museum.
Legacy and Recognition
Welty received virtually every honor available to an American writer — the Pulitzer, the National Medal of Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the PEN/Malamud Award — and was one of the first living authors to have her work collected by the Library of America while she still lived. She died on July 23, 2001, still in Jackson, at age 92. She remains a central figure in Southern literature, admired by readers and writers alike for the clarity of seeing that her best stories achieve, and for a career in which she never compromised, never cheapened her subject, and never left the place that was her material and her home.