Eudora Welty: A Biography

Front Cover
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 - 652 pages
Eudora Welty's works are treasures of American literature. When her first short-story collection was published in 1941, it heralded the arrival of a genuinely original writer who over the decades wrote hugely popular novels, novellas, essays, and a memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, that became a national bestseller. By the end of her life, Welty (who died in 2001) had been given nearly every literary award there was and was all but shrouded in admiration.
In this definitive and authoritative account, Suzanne Marrs restores Welty's story to human proportions, tracing Welty's life from her roots in Jackson, Mississippi, to her rise to international stature. Making generous use of Welty's correspondence-particularly with contemporaries and admirers, including Katherine Anne Porter, E. M. Forster, and Elizabeth Bowen-Marrs has provided a fitting and fascinating tribute to one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.
 

Contents

Shelter and Beyond 19091931
1
SelfDiscovery 19311941
35
Being Apart from What Matters World War II and the Home Front 19411945
85
Love First and then Separateness 19451951
138
Finding a Way Out 19511956
211
Losing Battles 19571966
264
Defending Against Time 19661973
321
The Strong Present Tense On and Off the Road 19741980
396
The Lonesomeness and Hilarity of Survival 19841991
487
Old Age Hath Yet Her Honor and Her Toil 19912001
545
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
572
APPENDICES
575
NOTES
580
BIBLIOGRAPHY
620
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
634
INDEX
639

Ceaselessly Into the Past SelfPortraits 19801984
446

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About the author (2005)

SUZANNE MARRS is the author of Eudora Welty: A Biography and One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty ; the editor of What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell ; and a recipient of the Phoenix Award for Distinguished Welty Scholarship. She is a professor of English at Millsaps College.

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