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There is no one more suited to get into the skins of Southern characters than Eudora Welty, a daughter of the South who has been a major force in American literature for over sixty years. Welty was born ninety
years ago in Jackson, Mississippi, to Christian Welty, an insurance executive, and his wife Chestina, a schoolteacher. Although Welty has traveled extensively over the years, she still lives in the house
her father built in 1925, and she has had her ear tuned to the speech of her native state almost all of her life.In Welty's autobiography One Writer's Beginnings
(1984) she describes incidents from her childhood as her family began a Sunday afternoon ride. Placing herself between the two adult ladies in the back seat, she soon commanded "Now, talk!" to
the other passengers—and while they talked, she listened. Even at a young age, Welty listened to the testimonials and tales of the South, rich in its cadence and nuances of language. In The Ponder Heart
(1953) the audience can almost hear Edna Earle demanding, "Now, listen!" as she relates the story of her family and the townspeople of Clay.
Early Years
For two years Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women (called the"W") and
then spent her last two years at the University of Wisconsin, graduating at age twenty. It was during this time that she also began a fervent interest in photography, which eventually
became the basis for employment during the Great Depression and books later in her life.After graduating from Wisconsin, Welty went on to complete a year of graduate work at
New York's Columbia School of Business, studying advertising. Upon her father's death, she returned to Jackson and worked at WJIX, the first local radio station, and began writing society stories for the
Memphis Commercial Appeal. Then in 1933, in the middle of the depression, she took a job as a state publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration
(WPA), a federal agency that operated to put people back to work during America's devastating economic collapse. She traveled all over Mississippi, photographing various
WPA projects and the people associated with them. In 1936, an exhibition of forty-five of those photographs was held in New York City, and a second one was held in 1937. Years
later, many of these duotone photographs from this time period became the basis for Welty's book, One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, A Snap-shot Album
(1971). In addition, more of her photographs were published in Eudora Welty Photographs (1989). World War II The first publication of her writing came in 1936, when her short story "Death of a Traveling Salesman" appeared in the small Ohio-based magazine Manuscript
. Over the next several years, Welty continued to have a several photographs and short stories published, and in 1940 she began a long association and friendship with Diarmuid Russell, the agent who
represented her until his death over thirty years later.In 1941, Welty's collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green (with an introduction by
Katherine Anne Porter) was published, and she was awarded second place in the O. Henry Awards for "A Worn Path," a short story which has become widely anthologized in
American literature textbooks. During America's involvement in World War II (1941–45), she continued publishing The Robber Bridegroom (1942) The Wide Net and Other Stories
(1943) and various short stories. Welty also worked for a while as a member of the staff of the New York Times Book Review. (Faced with certain negative comments about the
credibility of a Southern woman reviewing war books, Welty began writing under the pseudonym Michael Ravenna. Ironically, when Ravenna's reviews were praised, there were
numerous requests—which obviously had to be declined—for Ravenna to appear on various radio programs.) Celebrated Author After the war, Welty's first novels were Delta Wedding (1946) and The Golden Apples (1949). In December 1953 The Ponder Heart
(winner of the William Dean Howells Medal of the Academy of Arts and Letters) appeared in the New Yorker and was published as a novel by Harcourt a month later. The next year saw the publication of
The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, and Welty began working on the novel which was eventually was published as Losing Battles. In 1956, Welty attended the Broadway premier of The Ponder Heart
, a production which garnered three Tony awards, including one for actress Una Merkel as Edna Earle.For a time, Welty's devotion to her family slowed her writing. In 1958 she turned her
attention away from writing and to caring for her mother and brother. Over the next eight years she published only a few pieces, including the children's book The Shoe Bird (1964).
During this period, Welty also penned the essay, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" in response to the assassination in her hometown of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
In January 1966 Welty's mother and brother died four days apart, and after that Welty returned to a novel she had been working on, Losing Battles, that included a schoolteacher
character loosely based on Welty's mother. After completion of that novel, Welty became unhappy when Harcourt, her longtime publisher, demanded cuts in the manuscript, and she
subsequently severed business relations with that company and signed instead with Random House. In 1971 Welty was nominated for the National Book Award for Losing Battles (1970). In 1972,
The Optimist's Daughter (which had been published in an earlier form in the March 15, 1969, edition of the New Yorker) appeared and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1973,
thus bringing Welty international fame. Six years after this prize winning book came the publication of The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews followed in 1980 by The
Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. In 1983, Welty delivered a series of lectures at Harvard, and these became the basis for her acclaimed autobiographical work One Writer's Beginnings (1984).
Since her autobiography, there have been published several collections of interviews of Welty and book reviews by her. On July 24, 2001, Welty died in her home in Jackson, MS, a
true American literary treasure whose work readers relish the world over. Film adaptations of her work, however, have been almost nonexistent. There has been only
one previous cinematic adaptation of Welty's work—her short story "The Key" was released as a video for the deaf in 1996—and her acclaimed novel The Optimists' Daughter
has been optioned by actress Sally Field. Now, however, viewers can appreciate and applaud Eudora Welty through the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre production of The Ponder Heart
. Perhaps Welty gave her prophetic sanction to the production when, in a 1980 interview, she said about The Ponder Heart, "…[A] film is the way I would best imagine it could have been treated" (Ruas 66).
Sources: Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman ed. More Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Quote taken from the interview with Patricia Wheatley.
Ruas, Charles. Conversations with American Writers. New York: Knopf, 1984. Susan Thurman teaches at Henderson Community College in Kentucky. |
