Eudora Welty Books In Order

The Robber Bridegroom

Legendary figures of Mississippi’s past flatboatman Mike Fink and the dreaded Harp brothers mingle with characters from Eudora Welty s own imagination in an exuberant fantasy set along the Natchez Trace. Berry stained bandit of the woods Jamie Lockhart steals Rosamond, the beautiful daughter of pioneer planter Clement Musgrove, to set in motion this frontier fairy tale. For all her wild, rich fancy, Welty writes prose that is as disciplined as it is beautiful New Yorker.

Delta Wedding

A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family’s preparations for her cousin Dabney s wedding.

The Ponder Heart

Uncle Daniel Ponder, whose fortune is exceeded only by his desire to give it away, is a source of vexation for his niece, Edna Earle. Uncle Daniel’s trial for the alleged murder of his seventeen year old bride is a comic masterpiece. Awarded the William Dean Howells Medal of the american Academy of Arts and Letters. Drawings by Joe Krush.

Losing Battles

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 Optimist’s Daughter

It is easy to praise Eudora Welty, as Robert Penn Warren has written, but it is not so easy to analyze the elements in her work that make it so easy and such a deep plea sure to praise. To say that may, indeed, be the highest praise, for it implies that the work, at its best, is so fully created, so deeply realized, and formed with such apparent in nocence that it offers only itself, in shining unity. The Optimist’s Daughter is Miss Welty s work at its best, and reconfirms Mr. Warren s general tribute, including the difficulty of analysis: Laurel Hand, long absent from the South, comes from Chicago to New Orleans, where her father dies after surgery. With Fay, the stupid new young wife of her father, Laurel returns to her former Mississippi home and stays a few days after the funeral for reunions with old friends. In a night alone in the house she grew up in, she confronts elements of the past and comes to a better understanding of it and of herself and her parents. The simplicity of the story belies its universal implications. This is a story of the great interrelated family of those who never know the meaning of what happened to them. With unsurpassed artistry Miss Welty shows us Laurel s struggle to come to terms with her father s death and with the life of the small Mississippi town he was so intimately involved with. In trying to deal with people who, like Fay, never even care to un derstand what has happened to them, Laurel realizes that she too has kept her distance from a shared past. Like so many today, Laurel has lived in a city where she survives by avoiding any real involvement with those around her. It is only the shock of her father s death that leads her to new insights into the relationship between love and death and memory. Certainly this book will be a rewarding experience to readers of Miss Welty s earlier work. Newcomers will discover its many dimensions and great substance: the large cast of characters and the complexity of their relationships, the rich humor and subtlety of dialogue that reveals without describing, the wideness of scope compressed within the boundaries of a short novel, the wisdom and discernment that underlie the author s vision of human life.

Bride of the Innisfallen

This collection combines stories set in Welty’s special province, the rural South, with stories having a European locale. This gives a wider range to her fiction and demonstrates the remarkable talent of one of the finest short story writers of our time. ‘Humorous, piquant, graceful’ Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Sewanee Review.

A Curtain of Green

This is the first collection of Welty’s stories, originally published in 1941. It includes such classics as A Worn Path, Petrified Man, Why I Live at the P.O., and Death of a Traveling Salesman. The historic Introduction by Katherine Anne Porter brought Welty to the attention of the american reading public.

The Wide Net

These eight stories reveal the singular imaginative power of one of America’s most admired writers. Set in the Old Natchez Trace region, the stories dip in and out of history and range from virgin wilderness to a bar in New Orleans. In each story, Miss Welty sustains the high level of performance that, throughout her distinguished career, has won her numerous literary awards. ‘Miss Welty runs a photofinish with the finest prose artists of her time’ Time.

The Golden Apples

First published in 1949, ‘The Golden Apples‘ is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There’s Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There’s Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson. Eudora Welty has a fine ear for dialogue and describes each of the characters in incisive, haunting prose. ‘…
in the South,’ she says, ‘everybody stays busy talking all the time they’re not sorry for you to overhear their tales’. Welty deftly picks up their stories to create an unflinching potrait of everyday life in the American South and offers a deeply moving look at human nature.

Thirteen Stories

Thirteen outstanding short stories by Welty, written between 1937 and 1951. Miss Welty has written some of the finest short stories of modern times Orville Prescott, New York Times. Selected and with an Introduction by Ruth M. Vande Kieft.

Selected Stories of Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty’s subjects are the people who live in southern towns like Jackson, Mississippi, which has been her home for all of her long life. I’ve stayed in one place,’ she says, and ‘it’s become the source of the information that stirs my imagination.’ Her distinctive voice and wry observations are rooted in the southern conversational tradition. The stories in this volume, from the first two collections she published, range in tone from the quietly understated and psychologically subtle to the outrageously grotesque. Linking them all is Welty’s remarkable ear for the language and point of view of the South. ‘She’s a lot smarter than her cousins in Beula,’ someone remarks about a reputed suicide in one story. ‘Especially Edna Earle, that never did get to be what you’d call a heavy thinker. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the ‘c’ got through the ‘I’ in a Coca Cola sign.’ The stories in this volume, from the first two collections she published, range in tone from the quietly understated and psychologically subtle to the outrageously grotesque.

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

This complete collection includes all the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are forty one stories in all, including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories. With a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.

Stories, Essays and Memoirs

‘Stories, Essays, and Memoir’ contains all of Welty’s collected short stories, her first book, ‘A Curtain of Green and Other Stories’ 1941, stories based on her travels, and the ever popular memoir, ‘One Writer’s Beginnings’ 1984.

The Shoe Bird

Seventy years ago the musical fable ‘Peter and the Wolf’ unexpectedly took the world by storm. Written and composed by the Russian Serge Prokofiev, this droll story for narrator and orchestra has sold millions of recordings in countless versions, narrated by great performers from Sir John Gielgud to Sting. The only problem up until now has been that ‘Peter and the Wolf’ – composed specifically for children, and featuring a narrator with orchestra – is practically the only piece of its kind. The vast audience that loves ‘Peter’ has not been able to find a similarly enchanting musical story. But now all that will change! The Shoe Bird has arrived!

In The Shoe Bird multi-Grammy-award-winning performer and Guinness World Records holder Jim Dale brings to life a flock of unforgettable bird characters – Arturo the parrot, Gloria the goose, Minerva the owl, even the extinct Dodo! This is Eudora Welty’s fantastical story of how some feathered friends made a fateful switch from flying to wearing shoes, little knowing that they would soon become the prey of Freddy the Cat! Masterfully scored for full symphony orchestra and children’s choirs by Welty’s fellow Mississippian Samuel Jones, The Shoe Bird appeals immediately to children and adults, just like the classic Peter and the Wolf.

The Shoe Bird is a new work that reinvigorates a great tradition of storytelling fun for the whole family. It can be heard again and again, always rewarding the listener with the wit and wisdom of Eudora Welty, the delightful animal characters impersonated by Jim Dale, and the rich musical background of full symphony orchestra and chorus. Jim Dale is very enthusiastic and ready to promote The Shoe Bird which he considers one of his favorite recording projects.

One Time, One Place

Throughout her writing career Eudora Welty’s camera was a close companion. She is among the very few authors who are acclaimed for their work in both literature and photography. The 100 duotone pictures in this volume are selections from the many she took during the Great Depression as she traveled in her home state of Mississippi while she was working for the WPA.

The Eye of the Story

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’Makes the relationship between reading and writing extraordinarily close.’ The New York Times Book ReviewOne of America’s most admired authors, Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, which is still her home. She was educated locally and at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. She is the author of, among many other books, One Writer’s Beginnings, The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, and The Optimist’s Daughter.

One Writer’s Beginnings

Now available as an audio CD, in Eudora Welty’s own voice, or as a book. Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a ‘continuous thread of revelation’ she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father’s coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother’s sturdy independence, Eudora’s earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction. Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories painful as well as pleasant, to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.

Eudora Welty Photographs

The radiant world of Eudora Welty’s art is charged by a poignant and familiar beauty, and here in a stunning book of her photographs is a dazzling record of this writer’s unique and special vision. It is unusual remarkable for a major writer also to be an accomplished photographer. Eudora Welty is one of the very few whose great talent has been expressed in both photographs and fiction. This book brings together in one volume about 250 representative photographs from the few thousand that she took during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Although her camera’s view finder compresses much, like the frame in which she conceives her fiction, it finds elements that convey her deep compassion and her artist’s sensibilities. From the confines of her native Mississippi these photographs unfold the world of Eudora Welty’s art, reaching, extending, and exploring. In the Deep South of Depression times, when she began writing, she discovered the place into which she had been born and which would always be her subject. From here, as these photographs show, she approached and risked the outside world. From rural Mississippi to New Orleans, Charleston, New York City, and Yaddo, and then to Ireland, England, and the Continent Welty widened her vision and expanded her art. These photographs reveal that both in her fiction and in the pictures she took it has always been in place, in the special qualities of what is local, that she found her impulse. ‘I was smitten by the identity of place wherever I was,’ she said in 1989, ‘from Mississippi on I still am.’ The legions of appreciators of Welty’s photographs see in them the feelings and vision that are the hallmarks of her great literary art in such novels as Losing Battles and The Optimist’s Daughter, in her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings, and in her volumes of short stories. This serves as a definitive book of Welty’s photographs, compromising pictures from her personal collection, from the repository of Welty materials at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and from One Time, One Place, an album of her Depression era photographs published in 1972. Included are Mississippi scenes and people, emblems of folklife, carnival signs and performers, photographs taken in CHarleston, New Orleans, Mexico, New York City, Ireland, Paris, Nice, Italy, Wales, and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a significant group of Welty’s portraits of family members and friends.

Occasions

Occasions is a celebration of the short works of one of America’s most beloved writers. To mark the centennial of Eudora Welty’s birth, Pearl Amelia McHaney has collected more than sixty pieces by Welty that are largely unknown and have not been reprinted since their first appearances in magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers.

The gathering includes one of Welty’s earliest stories, Acrobats in the Park; a self analysis of her art printed in the Twenty Photographs portfolio; a recipe for Aunt Beck’s Chicken Pie served up in the novel Losing Battles; and a parody of Edmund Wilson’s scurrilousNew Yorker review of one of William Faulkner’s late novels. These occasional essays, tributes, stories, and comments will delight readers and reveal more of the genius of a favorite author deeply engaged with her people and their customs.

In these pieces Welty put pen to paper for just causes: electing honorable officials, selling war bonds, promoting reading and the arts. Her sophistication and insight resonate in tributes to Isak Dinesen, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy as well as in reviews of sculpture, painting, dance, and photography, and in her candid remarks about her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter. Her sly humor emerges in Women!! Make Turban in Own Home! a delightful parody of projects suggested in Popular Mechanics. Written between the 1930s and the 1990s, these fictions, essays, commemorations, reviews, and salutes reveal the sparkling imagination of a celebrated writer who continues her hold on a wide audience through these newfound pleasures.