Eudora Welty Biography

American Novelist and Short Story-Writer, The Optimist’s Daughter

Nov 16, 2009

Brief biography of American Southern author Eudora Welty, 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner for her The Optimist's Daughter.

Eudora Welty is known for her fictions set in the American South. Aside from The Optimist’s Daughter, her other notable works include Losing Battle, The Eye of a Story and The Golden Apples. She writes about people trying to find their place within Southern society, particularly women defying the stereotype of the so-called ‘Southern belle.”

Early Life of Eudora Welty

Eudora Alice Welty was born on April 13, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. She was also raised in Mississippi. Young Eudora loved the stories told by her family’s friends and neighbors. By the time she was 16 years old, she was writing her own stories.

She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin, then went to New York City to study advertising at Columbia University. After her father's death, and with the start of the Great Depression, she returned to her hometown Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived for most of her life.

Welty Early Years as a Writer

Welty’s first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, was published when she was 32. It was introduced by the writer Katherine Anne Porter, who was nearly two decades older than Welty. Porter helped establish her writing career. The following year Welty published her first novel, The Robber Bridegroom, a partly comical and partly romantic story set during America’s frontier years.

For most of her short stories, as well as the setting of her other novels, Welty returned to the Mississippi of her childhood, creating comic but thoughtful stories that celebrated life, sense of community belonging, and human relationships.

Later Years of Welty

Written when she was in her 60s, Welty’s late two novels, Losing Battles and The Optimist’s Daughter, are widely regarded as her best.

She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist’s Daughter, considered a masterpiece of social observation. It is set in the world of small-town Mississippi that she knew very well. Her stories is reminiscent of Carson McCullers as they share their sense of community. Welty has also been compared to William Faulkner for her skill in chronicling the South in times of depravity. Despite decadence of the situation in her stories, her works convey a sense of coherence, and not of fragmentation.

Insight on Eudora Welty

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Welty is a writer in the great Southern tradition in American literature. Like Mark Twain and William Faulkner, she belongs to the group of American writers from the South, who has a strong sense of place in her stories. One Writer’s Beginnings is her memoir. She died on July 23, 2001, aged 92.

Books by Eudora Welty

Goring, Rosemary, Ed. Larousse Dictionary of Writers. New York: Larousse, 1994.

McGovern, Una, Ed. Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2002.

Uglow, Jennifer, Compiler & Editor, revised by Maggy Hendry. The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography, 3rd Edition. London: Macmillan Publishers, 1999.

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