Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was a thoughtful writer whose work spanned several genres. Much of her writing focused on realistic human relationships — conflict, community,  interaction, and influence.Welty published her first short story, “The Death of a Traveling Salesman” in 1936; after that she found it easier to sell her stories to various publications. Her story also caught the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to Welty. Her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, was published in 1941. A sense of place is an important theme running though her work, as is true for others termed “Southern writers.”

In addition to writing she had books of her photography published, which highlighted people of different economic and social classes during the Great Depression. Welty won many awards for her writing, among them are: a Pulitzer Prize, an American Book Award, and six-time winner of the O. Henry Award for Short Stories.

Major works

• The Optimist’s Daughter
• Delta Wedding
• A Curtain of Green and Other Stories
• Losing Battles
• The Shoe Bird
• The Golden Apples

• Eudora Welty on Wikipedia
• Eudora Welty Foundation
• The Eudora Welty Society

Visit Eudora Welty’s Foundation and Home

• Eudora Welty House and Garden - Jackson, MS

Eudora Welty Quotes

“I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.”

“To imagine yourself inside another person… is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.”

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.”

“Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.”

“Since we must and do write each in our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another’s work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to and ask: Is it valid?”

“[Being a writer] comes from inside, and is in the lap of the gods.” (In a lecture to young writers, April 23, 1985)