Visit our companion site,
American Passages. Produced in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, this rich site includes an archive featuring over 3,000 images, audio clips, presentation software, and more.
Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.
Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.
Authors
Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
« back to list of Authors
Welty’s novels are The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Delta Wedding (1947), The Ponder Heart (1954), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972). Her Collected Stories (1980) draws from the volumes A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net (1943), Music from Spain (1948), The Golden Apples (1949), The Bride of Innisfallen (1955), and Thirteen Stories (1965). Later volumes are Moon Lake(1980) and Retreat (1981). A Flock of Guinea Hens Seen from a Car (1970) is poetry; among Welty’s many volumes of nonfiction prose are The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (1978), One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), and A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews (1994). Ann Waldron published Eudora: A Writer’s Life in 1998. Susan Marrs completes the picture in Eudora Welty: A Biography (2005) and One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty (2002). Good introductions are available in Gail Mortimer’s Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty’s Fiction (1994), Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place (1994) by Jan Nordby Gretlund, and Ruth D. Weston’s Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty (1994). Eudora Welty: A Bibliography by Noel Polk appeared in 1994.
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.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
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?
