Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty (Jackson, Mississippi, 1909–2001) was an American short-story writer, novelist and photographer who made the American South the center of her work. She wrote in English, and her importance lies in portraying Southern characters with humor, strangeness and close attention to everyday life.

She grew up in a middle-class Methodist family. Her mother, a schoolteacher, encouraged her love of reading, while her father, an insurance executive, passed on his fascination with gadgets and machines and with photography, themes that would later surface in her stories. She studied in Mississippi, Wisconsin and New York. After her father died in 1931 she returned to Jackson, where she worked for a local radio station and as a correspondent, then for the Works Progress Administration, traveling across the state and photographing rural poverty during the Great Depression.

Her first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green, appeared in 1941, with a foreword by Katherine Anne Porter, who became her mentor. Stories such as "A Worn Path" found a wide readership. Her first novel, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), moved away from psychological realism toward a modern fairy tale with echoes of the Brothers Grimm. Decades later came The Optimist's Daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973.

Her work blends humor, eccentricity and an undercurrent of violence, with a sharp eye on racism and family relations in the South. After 1960 she returned to Jackson to care for her mother and brothers, and she lived there until her death. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. Her Jackson house is now a museum, and her influence can be seen in Mississippi writers such as Richard Ford and Elizabeth Spencer.