This collection of complementary and interrelated essays by ten well-known Welty critics brings welcome clarification to the controversial subject of Eudora Welty and the political, a topic once presumed to be closed tight. As the essays prove, Welty has been inaccurately assessed by critics from Diana Trilling in the Nation (1943) to Claudia Roth Pierpont in the New Yorker (1998) as a writer who avoids political, historical, or cultural engagement in her fiction. The better question these essayists explore is not whether but how Welty’s work is to be understood as political. Harriet Pollack, Suzanne Marrs, Peggy Prenshaw, Noel Polk, Suzan Harrison, Ann Romines, Rebecca Mark, Barbara Ladd, Sharon Baris, and Danièle Pitavy-Souques place Welty’s seeming rejection of the political in her 1961 essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?” into the cultural and historical context of 1940–1960, when “individualism” was a code word for political and personal freedom and was defined in contrast to totalitarianism as represented by Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Welty, they show, though she repudiated the concept of fiction as editorial, wrote stories that were inherently and unavoidably political. The essayists look closely at how surprisingly often Welty’s fiction, criticism, and photographs are oblique responses to public political issues—political corruption, racial apartheid, poverty, McCarthyism and the Rosenberg trials, violent resistance to the civil rights movement, integration of schools, and filial piety and southern reverence for identities of the cultural past. The deceptive opposition of the terms private and political may be most at fault for misreading Welty. As the only living author to be reedited by the Library of America, Eudora Welty deserves a sound appreciation of her complex oeuvre. Eudora Welty and Politics provides just that, approaching Welty’s work from an all-new point of view to reveal how the writer repeatedly registered a political vision in her work.

Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness. Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.

Amusing events occur when Arturo, the parrot who works in a shoe store, fits the other birds with new shoes.

Drawing on the context in which the protection of the white female body is linked with guarding the U.S. southern body politic, Harriet Pollack traces a pattern in Eudora Welty's fiction in which a sheltered middle-class daughter is disturbed or delighted by an other-class woman who takes pleasure in "making a spectacle" of her corporeal self. Welty herself seeks a parallel self-exposure both through these stories that pair protected girls with at-risk flashers and through her photography's innovating representations of the black female body. Welty's escape from sheltering continues when, after finding herself in love with a man unwilling to acknowledge his homosexuality and so sharing the silence of his closet, she varies the plot of the other woman in a series of midcareer fictions. Additionally, Pollack addresses several critical controversies spawned by Welty's handling of other women's bodies. These concern the comic woman writer's relationship to issues of class and feminism, her puzzled-over and sometimes joyful rape plots, and her handling of race in fictions written when her region was immersed in its Jim Crow regulation of the black body. Two special features of the book are its significant reading of sixty-two visual images and its extensive work with Welty's unpublished manuscripts, in particular those begun during the turmoil of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s and continuing through the 1980s.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Susan V. Donaldson, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Jean C. Griffith, Ebony Lumumba, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Adrienne Akins Warfield The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty’s fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. The thirteen diverse voices in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s uses of African American signifying in her short stories and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. Contributors discuss her adaptations of gothic plots, haunted houses, Civil War stories, and film noir. And they frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in America, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to other works by such contemporary writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Discussions of race and class here also bring her masterwork The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, underrepresented in earlier conversations, into new focus. Moreover, as a group these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres.

A 2016 Edgar Award finalist, the “intimate, luminous portrait of a friendship” of two American literary icons (Kirkus, starred review). In 1970, Ross Macdonald wrote a letter to Eudora Welty, beginning a thirteen-year correspondence between fellow writers and kindred spirits. Though separated by background, geography, genre, and his marriage, the two authors shared their lives in witty, wry, tender, and at times profoundly romantic letters, each drawing on the other for inspiration, comfort, and strength. They brought their literary talents to bear on a wide range of topics, discussing each others' publications, the process of translating life into fiction, the nature of the writer’s block each encountered, books they were reading, and friends and colleagues they cherished. They also discussed the world around them, the Vietnam War, the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan presidencies, and the environmental threats facing the nation. The letters reveal the impact each had on the other’s work, and they show the personal support Welty provided when Alzheimer’s destroyed Macdonald’s ability to communicate and write. The editors of this collection, who are the definitive biographers of these two literary figures, have provided extensive commentary and an introduction. They also include Welty’s story fragment “Henry,” which addresses Macdonald’s disease. With its mixture of correspondence and narrative, Meanwhile There Are Letters provides a singular reading experience: a prose portrait of two remarkable artists and one unforgettable relationship.

In this definitive account of the life of one of the finest writers of the 20th century, Marrs restores Eudora Welty's story to human proportions, tracing Welty's history from her roots in Jackson, Mississippi, to her rise to international stature.

Letters revealing a lost literary world—and a unique friendship between a brilliant author and a New Yorker editor. For over fifty years, Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, two of our most admired writers, penned letters to each other. They shared their worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, and moments of despair and hilarity. Living half a continent apart, their friendship was nourished and maintained by their correspondence. What There Is to Say We Have Said bears witness to Welty and Maxwell’s editorial relationship—both in Maxwell’s capacity as New Yorker editor and in their collegial back-and-forth on their work. It’s also a chronicle of the literary world of the time; they talk of James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, John Cheever, and many more. It is a treasure trove of reading recommendations. Here, Suzanne Marrs—Welty’s biographer and friend—offers an unprecedented window into two intertwined lives. Through careful collection of more than three hundred letters as well as her own insightful introductions, she gives us “a vivid snapshot of 20th-century intellectual life and an informative glimpse of the author-editor relationship, as well a tender portrait of devoted friendship” (Kirkus Reviews).

In One Writer's Imagination, Suzanne Marrs draws upon nearly twenty years of conversations, interviews, and friendship with Eudora Welty to discuss the intersections between biography and art in the Pulitzer Prize winner's work. Through an engaging chronological and comprehensive reading of the Welty canon, Marrs describes the ways Welty's creative process transformed and transfigured fact to serve the purposes of fiction. She points to the sparks that lit Welty's imagination -- an imagination that thrived on polarities in her personal life and in society at large. Marrs offers new evidence of the role Welty's mother, circle of friends, and community played in her development as a writer and analyzes the manner in which her most heartfelt relationships -- including her romance with John Robinson -- inform her work. She charts the profound and often subtle ways Welty's fiction responded to the crucial historical episodes of her time -- notably the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement -- and the writer's personal reactions to war, racism, poverty, and the political issues of her day. In doing so, Marrs proves Welty to be a much more political artist than has been conventionally thought. Scrutinizing drafts of Welty's work, Marrs reveals an evolving pattern of revision increasingly significant to the author's thematic concerns and precision of style. Welty's achievement, Marrs explains, confirms theories of creativity even as it transcends them, remaining in its origins somewhat mysterious. Marrs's relationship to Eudora Welty as a friend, scholar, and archivist -- with access to private papers and restricted correspondence -- makes her a unique authority on Welty's forty-year career. The eclectic approach of her study speaks to the exhilarating power of imagination Welty so thoroughly enjoyed in the act of writing.

A collection of stories which capture the joys and sorrows of life in the deep South.