Eudora Welty 1909-2001

The canon of mainstream: short stories and novels by Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Irving Shaw, Bernard Malamud, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Marry Higgins Clark, Joyce Carol Oates.

Major themes

Style

Sophie's Choice is a realistic novel largely narrated in the first person by an older Stingo, now a successful novelist, but also including Sophie's (frequently revised) memories of her childhood, wartime Warsaw, and her imprisonment at Auschwitz -- presented in both the first and third persons. The narrative is therefore complex, moving back and forth in time between Stingo's description of the summer of 1947 and his relationship with Sophie and Nathan, his own earlier life in Virginia, and Sophie's experiences. In addition, the mature Stingo digresses at length both on his attitudes as a youth (occasionally including his journal entries, particularly after sexual experiences) as well as on the broader issues involving the American South and the Holocaust.

One of the most important parallels in Sophie's Choice, as Stingo explicitly points out, is between the worst abuses of the American South — both its slave-holding past and the lynchings of the book's present — and Polish anti-Semitism. Just as Sophie is left conflicted by her father's attitudes towards Poland's Jews, Stingo analyzes his own culpability derived from his family's slave-holding past, eventually deciding to write a book about Nat Turner — an obvious parallel to Styron's own controversial novel The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Similarly, by placing a non-Jewish character at the center of an Auschwitz story, Styron suggests the universality of the suffering under the Third Reich. Though several characters, including Stingo, discuss in detail the fact that the Jewish people suffered far more than other groups, Stingo also describes Hitler's attempts to eliminate the Slavs or turn them into slave labor and makes the case that the Holocaust cannot be understood as an exclusively Jewish tragedy. In contrast, Nathan, whose paranoid condition makes him particularly sensitive about his ethnicity, is the novel's prime spokesman for this exclusivity. His inability to cope with the fact that Sophie, a Polish-Catholic raised in an anti-Semitic nation, shared the sufferings of European Jews, while he was prevented, by his mental illness, from even enlisting in the military, causes him to accuse Sophie of complicity in the Holocaust and leads to their mutual destruction.

Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 19Q9 in the Southern city of Jackson, Mississippi, where she had lived almost her whole life. As the daughter of an insurance man and a school-teacher, she enjoyed a conventional girlhood. She recalls pleading with her brothers to teach her golf, sharing their enthusiasm for baseball, and bicycling to the library in two petticoats to forestall the librarian's caustic remark, "I can see straight through you."

Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women, studied at the University of Wisconsin from which she graduated in 1929. She did graduate work at Columbia University School of Business, anticipating a career in advertising. However, she was unable to find a steady job in advertising. The Depression sent her home to Jackson with a belief, which did not fail her. She hoped she that she would succeed as a writer of fiction.

She worked as a publicist for a government agency for several years traveling throughout Mississippi, taking photographs and interviewing people. Her experience and observations inspired her to write fiction. Eudora Welty is known for her searching studies of small-town life in the South. She has lived in Mississippi all of her life, and her affection for the South can be seen in her work. Her long-life friends were R.P.Warren and Katherine Anne Porter.

Her first short story Death of a Travelling Salesman was published in a small magazine in 1936. Since then she published numerous collections of short stories, including A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943). These were followed by The Golden Apples (1949), one of her best-known volumes of short stories, The Bride of Innishfallen and Other Stories (1955), Thirteen Stories (1965). Welty's short stories appeared in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, published in 1980 which reveals the whole range of her artistry over four decades of writing. The Wide Net is a comedy of misunderstanding between newlyweds. The young wife threatens to kill herself, and the husband calls the community together to drag the river for her body. The description of the forest in autumn is elegiac, knowing that all things must come to an end, and yet inevitably return.

Her longer fiction consists of the novelette The Robber Bridegroom (1942). She is also the author of several novels, including Delta Wedding (1045), The Ponder Heart (1954), which was made into a Broadway play, Loosing Battles (1970), Welty's fine comic novel about a family reunion in the rural South. Two years later, in 1972, Welty produced The Optimist’s Daughter, a poignant short novel about family conflicts; this book won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. An autobiographical memoir entitled One Writer's Beginnings, based on lectures Welty gave at Harvard University, was published in 1983 to wide critical acclaim.

She described the influence of her family and surroundings on her writing. The book of essays and reviews appeared in The Eye of the Story (1978). Her Complete Novels and Stories, Essays, and Memoirs were published in 1998.

Welty's widely recognized triumph is a painstaking accuracy in colloquial speech. The exactly right word always matters to her. She has always been fascinated by words, by the way people say things, by snatches of overheard dialogue. Welty's style combines delicacy with shrewd, robust humor. The mixture of realism and fantasy in some of her stories gives them an almost mythical quality. Her major themes extend beyond the South - loneliness, the pain of growing up and the need for people to understand themselves and their neighbors.

She greatly admired the work of Catherine Anne Porter, who befriended her when she was sending out stories and getting back rejection slips. It was the literary agent Diarmuid Russell who shared Welty’s belief in an ultimate success. He not only took her on as a client, but said of a certain Welty story that if the editor didn't accept it, "he ought to be horse-whipped." (The editor in question bought the story).

Welty admitted to being blessed with a visual mind, and she said that this gift made for "the best shorthand a writer can have." She once wrote, "To watch everything about me, I regarded grimly and possessively as a need." Clearly that need became an enviable, artistic vision.

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