Eudora Welty

American author and historian Suzanne Marrs’s Eudora Welty (2005) chronicles the life of Eudora Welty, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author whose short stories and novels were frequently set in the American South. According to the Houston Chronicle, for decades Welty “adamantly opposed the idea of a biography and in numerous interviews had refused to talk about her personal life.” That changed, however, after meeting Marrs, whose talent and expertise convinced Welty to authorize an official biography.

Born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909, Eudora was the daughter of Christian Webb Welty, a mild-mannered insurance executive, and Chestina Welty, a former schoolteacher. Chestina, in particular, instilled in her daughter a love of the written word. In Eudora’s words, her mother believed that “any room in our house, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or be read to.” Christian, meanwhile, instilled in his daughter a fascination with technology and gadgets, which she would use as symbolism in many of her major works. Christian also loved photography, a pursuit he passed on to his daughter as well.

Around the time Eudora graduated from high school, the family moved to a house at 1119 Pinehurst Street, designed by the prominent architect, Wyatt C. Hedrick. Eudora remained a permanent resident of the home until her death, at which point the house was designated as a Mississippi historical landmark.



From 1925 until 1927, Eudora matriculated at the Mississippi State College for Women, at which point she finished her studies as an English major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her father then urged her to pursue a more practical degree, so she studied advertising at Columbia Business School in New York City. Unfortunately, the Great Depression had broken out not long before her graduation from business school, making the practical applications of her new degree limited.

Upon Eudora’s return to Jackson after failing to find work in New York, her father died after a long battle with leukemia. She held a number of jobs over this period, working at a radio station, the Memphis newspaper Commercial Appeal, and later obtaining employment through the Works Progress Administration as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. During this period, she developed her journalistic eye for detail as a publicity agent, interviewing locals, collecting their stories, and taking photographs of their daily lives. The keen sense of observation she developed would be instrumental in crafting her earliest short stories. She also built a community around the small literary scene in Jackson, founding and holding regular meetings of the Night-Blooming Cereus Club with local writers and other literary enthusiasts.

In 1936, five years after returning to Jackson from New York, Eudora quit her other jobs to focus on writing full-time. That same year, she published her first short story, “The Death of a Traveling Salesman” in Manuscript magazine. Over the next five years, she published a number of stories documenting life in the American South in magazines such as The New Yorker and The Sewanee Review. Then in 1941, Eudora collected these works into a full-length collection called A Curtain of Green. This catapulted her literary career into the stratosphere, earning her a spot in The New York Times Book Review and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She spent much of the next two decades traveling Europe, becoming a house lecturer at Oxford University and Cambridge University.



In 1960, Eudora returned to Jackson to help her two brothers care for their mother, Chestina. Three years later, Eudora wrote a story in The New Yorker called “Where Is This Voice Coming From?” It was written from the perspective of the man who assassinated the Mississippi-based civil rights activist Medgar Evans, who had been killed earlier in the year. Eudora began the 1970s with the publication of her first book of photography, One Time, One Place, documenting the Great Depression. In 1972, she expanded a story she had previously published in The New Yorker into the short novel The Optimist’s Daughter, for which she received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Eudora continued to write, take photographs, and deliver lectures until her death by natural causes in 2001. A quote from The Optimist’s Daughter adorns her headstone: “For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.”