Featuring a new introduction, this updated edition of the New York Times bestselling classic by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author and one of the most revered figures in American letters is “profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write” (Los Angeles Times). Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. Everyday sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father’s coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that became a metaphor for her mother’s sturdy independence, Eudora’s earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. In her vivid descriptions of growing up in the South—of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the children they taught—she recreates the vanished world of her youth with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction, capturing “the mysterious transfiguring gift by which dream, memory, and experience become art” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Part memoir, part exploration of the seeds of creativity, this unique distillation of a writer’s beginnings offers a rare glimpse into the Mississippi childhood that made Eudora Welty the acclaimed and important writer she would become.

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.

As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South's literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. His essays in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition maintain an abiding interest in Polk's major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse--the bricks and mortar, as it were--and a work's grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk's scholarship. Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition collects Polk's essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South's literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis. Noel Polk is professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly . From 1981 to 2006, he edited the Library of America's complete edition of William Faulkner's novels. He is the author of Outside the Southern Myth; Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner; and Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work .

Collects photographs of Mississippians that Welty took in the 1930s when she worked for the Works Progress Administration.

“A wonderful tragicomedy” of a Mississippi family, a vast inheritance, and an impulsive heir, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Delta Wedding (The New York Times). Daniel Ponder is the amiable heir to the wealthiest family in Clay County, Mississippi. To friends and strangers, he’s also the most generous, having given away heirlooms, a watch, and so far, at least one family business. His niece, Edna Earle, has a solution to save the Ponder fortune from Daniel’s mortifying philanthropy: As much as she loves Daniel, she’s decided to have him institutionalized. Foolproof as the plan may seem, it comes with a kink—one that sets in motion a runaway scheme of mistaken identity, a hapless local widow, a reckless wedding, a dim-witted teenage bride, and a twist of dumb luck that lands this once-respectable Southern family in court to brave an embarrassing trial for murder. It’s become the talk of Clay County. And the loose-tongued Edna Earle will tell you all about it. “The most revered figure in contemporary American letters,” said the New York Times of Eudora Welty, which also hailed The Ponder Heart—a winner of the William Dean Howells Medal which was adapted into both a Broadway play and a PBS Masterpiece series—as “Miss Welty at her comic, compassionate best.”

New scholarly vistas for the study of Weltyas stories. Winner of the 1991 Eudora Welty Prize

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

Three generations of Granny Vaughn's descendants gather at her Mississippi home to celebrate her 90th birthday. Possessed of the true storyteller's gift, the members of this clan cannot resist the temptation to swap tales.

Eudora Welty holds a prominent position among Southern writers, receiving critical attention in publications that scan a wide range of interests. Journals that specialize in American literature, journals that publish general essays, and journals that focus on Southern literature frequently include articles about her works. Her writings have been included in anthologies and have been adapted for the stage and television. This book traces the evolving critical response to her fiction. In a lucid introductory essay, Champion presents an overview and summarizes the body of criticism on Welty's fiction. The rest of the volume presents representative selections of criticism from the initial reception of Welty's work to the present day. The selections are grouped in chapters devoted to Welty's principal writings. Her fiction is treated chronologically, and the selections within each chapter are also arranged in chronological order. Thus the book charts the development of Welty criticism over an extended period of time. A bibliography of works for further reading completes the volume.