Eudora Welty

Can't find it here? Try Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk:

Search:
Keywords:

Out-of-print items can usually be found on the used market. Locate them at Amazon.com. Just click GO in the following search box. Out-of-print items appear on the last pages of the list.

Books

The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories
| Paperback | Hardcover |
| Paperback |
Collection of short stories by Eudora Welty, published in 1955. The seven stories, focused largely on female characters, elaborate upon tenuous relationships of the heart in a difficult world and upon the importance of place; they share a more experimental, allusive style than the rest of her work. -- The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature

Country Churchyards

| Hardcover |

| Hardcover |
The doyenne of southern letters has enjoyed an avocation in photography in addition to her vocation of writing. In fact, Welty worked for the WPA in the 1930s and 1940s, traveling around her native Mississippi, documenting the ways of life distinctive to that state. One of the "themes" of those photographs was country churchyards, and 90 of those particular images have now been gathered into this album. Welty's friend and fellow southern fiction writer Elizabeth Spencer supplies a beautiful introduction, in which she connects Welty's interests and sensibilities to what she observed and absorbed as she explored the cemeteries of rural Mississippi. "What seems to speak most plainly to me," Spencer relates, "is Eudora Welty's vision of death as a part of life." And the richly textured black-and-white photographs boldly but also enchantingly remind the viewer of that correlation. -- Brad Hooper
From Booklist: Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A Curtain of Green and Other Stories

| Paperback | Hardcover |

| Paperback | Hardcover |
When this title first appeared on November 7, 1941, it immediately established its author as a leading voice in American letters. To celebrate the release fifty years ago, HBJ offers this special 50th anniversary edition. A half-century has not dated these stories, which include Petrified Man, Powerhouse, Why I Live at the P.O. and more. -- Ingram

Delta Wedding

| Paperback | Hardcover | Hardcover, LARGE PRINT |

| Paperback |
On its surface, Delta Wedding is a story about the preparations for a wedding by a Southern clan. As one of the characters remarks, the family takes "you in circles, whirling delightedly about [but} nothing really so very much happened." Anyone expecting a page-turner about plantation life or a thickly plotted potboiler will surely be disappointed. Instead, you must be willing to believe that "old stories, family stories, Mississippi stories [are] the same as very holy or very passionate." The plot, such as it is, is simple: the extended Fairchild family reunites for a wedding, and everyone brings their dreams, memories, grudges, and intrigues. As with any "typical" family reunion, there is a pervasive threat of scandal that never quite pans out, and several petty incidents get blown out of proportion by the affected characters. The sheer number of kinfolk can be overwhelming at times, but they are clearly delineated (although it must be said that the black servants rarely transcend stereotype, which is undoubtedly an accurate portrayal of how a rich Southern family would have viewed the help). Welty's drawling humor gives the narrative much warmth and vitality; her ability to switch perspective seamlessly from one character to the next is truly without equal. All in all, Welty writes beautifully of familial relations and social manners; she can truly be considered the Jane Austen of the South. -- Reviewer: D. C. Smith

The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews

| Paperback | Hardcover |

| Paperback | Hardcover |
Much like her highly acclaimed One Writer's Beginnings, The Eye of the Story offers Eudora Welty's invaluable meditations on the art of writing. In addition to seven essays on craft, this collection brings together her penetrating and instructive commentaries on a wide variety of individual writers, including Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. "In criticism as in fiction, Miss Welty's observations are blessed with a dazzling accuracy." -- The Nation

The Golden Apples

| Paperback | Hardcover | Library Binding |

| Paperback | Hardcover |
Collection of short stories by Eudora Welty, published in 1949. The stories had all been published previously, and Welty added one novella-length story, Main Families in Morgana. Symbolism from Greek mythology unifies the stories, all of which are set in the Mississippi Delta town of Morgana over a 40-year period. The hero of Moon Lake and the guitarist in Music from Spain are Perseus figures. King MacLain, the protagonist of Shower of Gold, is a sexually adventurous Zeus figure. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Lily Daw and the Three Ladies (New York Times On the Web)
| Online |

Losing Battles

| Paperback |

| Paperback | Hardcover |
Three generations of Granny Vaughn's descendants gather at her Mississippi home to celebrate her 90th birthday. Possessed of the true storyteller's gift, the members of this clan cannot resist the temptation to swap tales.

The Making of a Writer: Listening in the Dark (New York Times On the Web)
| Online |

One Writer's Beginning

| Paperback | Hardcover | Library Binding |

| Paperback | Hardcover | Library Binding |
Fiction writer Eudora Welty had a few things going for her from the start. First off, she grew up in the American South. Southern novelists seem to be born storytellers. Secondly, there was a lot of religion floating around her childhood town of Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1900s. Religion is good for storytelling, too. Lastly, Welty can conjure up more from one afternoon of her youth spent listening to older folks yammering away than most people can recall from their whole childhoods. In this beautifully evocative memoir, she brings to life her family, her younger self, and her surroundings as magnificently as she does her fictional characters. From a tender age, Welty had a craving for a story well told, whether it came from the library books she gulped down or the gossiping family seamstress. And reading words wasn't enough for her; she heard, tasted, even devoured them. "There has never been a line read," Welty writes, "that I didn't hear."

The Optimist's Daughter

| Paperback | Paperback, LARGE PRINT | Hardcover |
The Optimist's Daughter is a compact and inward-looking little novel, a Pulitzer Prize winner that's slight of page yet big of heart. The optimist in question is 71-year-old Judge McKelva, who has come to a New Orleans hospital from Mount Salus, Mississippi, complaining of a "disturbance" in his vision. To his daughter, Laurel, it's as rare for him to admit "self-concern" as it is for him to be sick, and she immediately flies down from Chicago to be by his side. The subsequent operation on the judge's eye goes well, but the recovery does not. He lies still with both eyes heavily bandaged, growing ever more passive until finally--with some help from the shockingly vulgar Fay, his wife of two years--he simply dies. Together Fay and Laurel travel to Mount Salus to bury him, and the novel begins the inward spiral that leads Laurel to the moment when "all she had found had found her," when the "deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself" and begins to flow again. ...

The Ponder Heart

| Paperback | Hardcover |

| Paperback |
Comic novella by Eudora Welty, published in 1954. Cast as a monologue, it is rich with colloquial speech and descriptive imagery. The narrator of the story is Miss Edna Earle Ponder, one of the last living members of a once-prominent family, who manages the Beulah Hotel in Clay, Miss. She tells a traveling salesman the history of her family and fellow townsfolk. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

The Robber Bridegroom

| Paperback | Hardcover |

| Paperback | Textbook Binding |
This lovely novella introduced Eudora Welty to the world. Now it can introduce you to Eudora Welty. A raucous, genre-bending mixture of historical fiction, romance novel, and tall tale -- all shot through with the compassion and psychological subtlety for which Welty would become famous -- The Robber Bridegroom still holds a place of honor in Southern literature. -- Reviewer: Timothy Hulsey

Why I Live at the P.O.

| Audio Cassette |

The Wide Net and Other Stories

| Paperback |

Anthologies

Eudora Welty: Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America)
| Hardcover |
| Hardcover |
This Library of America volume gathers all the long fiction published by the beloved Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Throughout her long and storied career, Welty has been most famous, perhaps, for her short stories. But it's in her novels that she attempted some of her most ambitious and powerful creations: the idiosyncratic fable that is The Robber Bridegroom, drawing on legends, local history, folktale, and myth; the underrated, wickedly funny short novel The Ponder Heart; and Losing Battles, a familial epic 15 years in the making and begun in bits and pieces while Welty cared for her sick mother. In a strange inversion of the author's usual career trajectory, Welty's only attempt at a roman à clef came late in life, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Optimist's Daughter, the quiet, moving, largely autobiographical story of a woman coming to grips with her father's death. The novels alone earn Welty a place as one of the finest writers our century has produced; taken together with the Library of America companion volume, Stories, Essays, & Memoir, it's a body of work that William Maxwell calls "beyond human power of praising." Welty rarely strayed for long from the place of her birth, but her fiction is as capacious as the human heart itself. Like Faulkner, she has taken her own corner of Mississippi and made it encompass the world.

Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir (Library of America, 102)

| Hardcover |

| Hardcover |
It's small wonder that the Library of America chose Eudora Welty as the first living (at that time) author published in this prestigious series. Welty was the kind of writer people routinely call "an American institution." But don't let the sweet white-haired-old-lady image fool you: Welty's work is anything but benign. For more than 50 years, Welty spoke with a fierce and uncompromising literary voice. Or, rather, voices: the stories collected in this volume feature a dizzying array of characters, each of whom seems to whisper directly into the reader's ear. From the toxic rage of Where Is the Voice Coming From? to the jazzy rhythms of Powerhouse, these tales blaze with intensity and a comic energy that's both gentle and fierce. Even that bane of junior-high-school speech tournaments everywhere, "Why I Live at the P.O.," benefits from rereading; as far as this brand of down-home farce goes, Welty does it better than anyone. Bringing together the contents of Welty's four short-fiction collections, this Library of America volume also includes several essays as well as Welty's very fine 1984 memoir, One Writer's Beginnings. In it she speaks of connections, continuities, the way both her fiction and her experiences emerged gradually into focus over time: ...suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. This volume is that light thrown back; the full import of Welty's enormously influential work is perhaps apparent only now, in this substantial and rewarding retrospective of her career. -- Mary Park

Eudora Welty Reads : Why I Live at the P.O., a Worn Path, a Memory (Audio Cassette)

| Audio Cassette |