Eudora: A Writer’s Life

“Your private life should be kept private,” said Eudora Welty in response to a question about the relevance of biography. “My own I don’t think would particularly interest anybody, for that matter. But I’d guard it; I feel strongly about that. They’d have a hard time trying to find out something about me.”

This first biography of Eudora Welty makes a significant contribution to the world of letters as a chronicle of the life and achievements of one of our greatest living authors, a woman of paramount importance in the American literary canon. From a Mississippi childhood to a brief editorial career in New York, from the sale of her first short story to her beloved and bestselling memoir–One Writer’s Beginnings, which she wrote at age seventy-five–this biography charts the details and moments that contributed to the development of Welty’s unique vision and unforgettable voice.

Here, too, are her literary influences, including her correspondence and meeting with the great man Faulkner, the invaluable friendships with Katherine Anne Porter and Elizabeth Bowen, the rivalry with Carson McCullers, and the small circle of lifelong confidants to whom Eudora entrusted her work: agent Diarmuid Russell, editor Mary Lou Aswell, and Robert Penn Warren. Ann Waldron brings together the details and moments of Welty’s life, and shows how this writer’s sensibility is formed and informed above all by a sense of place and purpose.

Elegant and evenhanded, respectful and authoritative, the first biography to chart the life of this national treasure is required reading for Welty fans everywhere.