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EudoraWeltyOnstage.com
The stories of America's great writer performed onstage

About Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909. What she saw and understood in that city and state inspired her life's remarkable contribution to world literature. Eudora Welty wrote five novels, many famous short stories, many wise essays. She took remarkable photographs. She amassed a body of work simultaneously strong and supple, delicate and refined, personal and universal. In the summer of 2001 she passed away, honored as one of America's treasures.

In her lifetime Miss Welty's writing was grouped with other Southerners, with other women, with other Americans. Now, seen as a whole, the body of her work emerges, like Chekhov's, like Jane Austen's, specific to its time and place: timeless in its resonance.

Welty's writing, which can be laugh outloud funny, bears witness to the rapture of the commonplace: a plate with bread, the love between a husband and wife, a school bus, Her confrontations with the great issues of her time and place - poverty, racism, ignorance - were subtle and indirect, and controversial for their subtlety.

She took photographs while traveling throughout Mississippi on assignment for the WPA. Her portraits bear witness that faced with hardship the human spirit is irrepressibly hopeful, saucy and proud. So, too, were the characters and stories she created.

Tributes to a life's work

The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Eudora Welty, chronicler of Southern life …When a beloved writer dies, the world loses a great figure, but the writing remains.”

The Los Angeles Times
“Eudora Welty should be required reading …one of modern America's most celebrated writers, a lyrical homebody who found great moments in the commonplace.”

The New York Times
A reader might almost imagine that Jackson formed like a pearl around her and that she was its luster.

The Dallas Morning News
“Eudora Welty last survivor of the Southern Renaissance … her presence resonated throughout American culture.”

The Washington Post
“Eudora Welty grand lady of American literature … Was Welty a regional writer? Yes, ma'am. But she was also worldly. The major themes of her stories were not the traditional Southern self-flagellation motifs of guilt and oppression and racism and violence. Her characters, like her fiction and her life, are not complex. They are dead-on, powerful, sophisticated in their simplicity.”

USA Today
“Eudora Welty's lyrical prose filled up her 'daring life' … She could be tender, tough and comic. She rejoiced in a sense of place, the South, but wrote universal stories about pain and loss, family and community.”

People Magazine
“Eudora Welty leaves a legacy of award-winning writing and legions of loving fans. Finely observed tales of small town Mississippi life … were acidly funny and as southern as a hot buttered biscuit.”

CNN
“Eudora Welty’s stories bear repeating … While we wait for another such genius to appear on the horizon, we can read to our heart’s delight in the fiction of Eudora Welty.”

Salon.com
”Forget that ‘greatest Southern writer’ stuff. She was a deadly funny writer and a sly, gracious queen of literature.”

Time Magazine
“Considered by many literary critics to be America's greatest living writer … Welty's many honors included the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for ‘The Optimist's Daughter.’ The recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including ones from Harvard and Yale, Welty was also recognized internationally. In 1987, France knighted her. Welty's autobiography, ‘One Writer's Beginnings’ became the longest-running book on The New York Times' best-seller list in 1984.”

Written by Eudora Welty

A Curtain of Green (1941)
The Robber Bridegroom (1942)
The Wide Net (1943)
Delta Wedding
(1946)
The Golden Apples (1949)
The Ponder Heart (1954)
The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955)
Losing Battles (1970)
The Optimist's Daughter (1972)
The Eye of the Story (1978)
One Writer's Beginnings (1984

For further information:

The Eudora Welty Foundation
The Eudora Welty NewsLetter
The Mississippi Writer's Page: Eudora Welty
The Eudora Welty Society
Mississippi Department of Archives and History