Biography

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised by parents from the North, Eudora Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. She began to write fiction after returning to Mississippi, during which time she worked as a radio writer, as a newspaper society editor, and then as a photographer and interviewer with the Works Progress Administration. In such short-story collections as A Curtain of Green (1941), The Golden Apples (1949), and her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Optimist's Daughter (1972), Welty's writing captures the pain and humor of everyday southern families.

Explorations

Because of Faulkner's importance in establishing a southern presence in modern American fiction, and in shaping expectations about southern writers, Eudora Welty's originality hasn't been fully appreciated. To catalogue her as a Modernist is to miss her sharp and powerful sense of humor; to call her a realist or a regionalist is to demean the creativity and the mordant themes in her narratives. Petrified Man (1941) can be read as a situation comedy or as a sketch in the Mark Twain tradition. But it can also be read as a work which engages thoroughly with Modernist concerns.

1. Petrified Man is mostly dialogue, and this dialogue is mostly between Leota and Mrs. Fletcher. How would you compare these conversations to ones in either Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited or Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro? How does Welty's dialogue achieve its comic effects?

2. A great deal happens -- or rather a great deal is talked about -- in Leota's beauty shop. How do the major characters react to this jumble of gossip and events? Do they change or learn anything?

3. Consider this narrative as a story about telling stories: why we do it, and whether or not anyone actually listens. What would such a reading suggest about Welty's sense of her own situation, or predicament, as a modern writer?

Other sites to consult:

• A brief biography and bibliography from the Eudora Welty Newsletter.
• "The World Comes to Her", a wonderful article about Welty by Michael Skube on y'all.com
• A conversation with Tim Gautreaux, an insightful interview in which Gautreaux, a writer who bases most of his fiction in Southern Louisiana, where he lives, talks about "the Southern writer" in the tradition of Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and others.