Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909, and attended the public schools there. She published several pieces in magazines for children before she reached her teens. From 1925-1927, she attended Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW, or the "W" as it was called) in Columbus, but transferred for her final two years of college to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She spent an academic year in New York City, studying at the Columbia University School of Business but attending lectures, plays, concerts, and art exhibitions as well. The untimely death of her father in 1931 prompted her return to Jackson, where she worked for the local radio station and wrote Jackson and Delta society news for the Memphis, Tennessee, Commercial Appeal, a major newspaper for northwest Mississippi. In 1935 and 1936, she worked for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program the Works Progress Administration (WPA), serving as a "junior publicity agent" and traveling to many parts of Mississippi to promote road building, new airstrips, canning factories, and other efforts to bring economic progress to poor and remote rural areas of the state. In 1936 she published her first important short story, and from that time onward her writing career expanded and found considerable success, as the list of book publications below indicates. All of Welty's writing is the product of a determined shaping imagination and a deep love and understanding for the power of carefully chosen language to evoke charactersin dramatic motion. Her stories are very much created by her own art out of materials she found and was touched by, material assembled by the artist's eye.
EUDORA WELTY(1909): A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
1941 A Curtain of Green (short
stories). Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Doran.
1942 The Robber Bridegroom (short
novel). Doubleday Doran.
1943 The Wide Net and Other Stories
(short stories). New York: Harcourt Brace.
1946 Delta Wedding(novel).
Harcourt Brace.
1948 Music from Spain (short story
published in separate binding; limited edition). Greenville, MS:
Levee Press. (This story became a major section of The Golden Apples, published
the following year.)
1949 The Golden Apples (cycle of
related stories). Harcourt Brace.
1954 Selected Stories of Eudora Welty.
New York: Modern Library.
1954 The Ponder Heart (short novel).
Harcourt Brace.
1955 The Bride of the Innisfallen and
Other Stories. Harcourt Brace.
1957 Place in Fiction (essay; limited
edition). New York: House of Books.
1964 The Shoe Bird (children's story).
Harcourt Brace & World.
1965 Thirteen Stories, ed. Ruth Vande
Kieft. Harcourt Brace & World.
1970 Losing Battles (novel). New
York: Random House.
1971 One Time, One Place: Mississippi
in the Depression, A Snapshot Album (photographsby Welty with a fine
introduction by her). Random House.
1972 The Optimist's Daughter (novel).
Random House.
1978 The Eye of theStory (essays).
Random House.
1984 One Writer's Beginnings
(autobiography). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
1984 Conversationswith Eudora Welty,
ed. Peggy Prenshaw (collected interviews). Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi.
1989 Photographs, with a foreword by
Reynolds Price. University Press of Mississippi.
1994 A Writer's Eye: Collected Book
Reviews, ed. Pearl Amelia McHaney. University Press of Mississippi.
1995 More Conversations with Eudora
Welty, ed. Peggy Prenshaw. University Press of Mississippi.