Though the interlocking nature of The Golden Apples is gone, a new theme emerges. It is perhaps the greatest triumph of her distinguished career, an unmatched example of the story cycle.Īfter the publication of this book, Welty traveled to Europe and drew upon her European experiences in two stories she would eventually group with “Circe,” a story narrated by the witch-goddess, and with four stories set in the American South. Midway through the composition process, she finally realized that she was writing about a common cast of characters, that the characters of one story seemed to be younger or older versions of the characters in other stories, and she decided to create a book that was neither novel nor story collection. When Welty began writing the stories, however, she had no idea that they would be connected. In Welty’s next book, the unity of the novel is missing but not wholly. The Golden Apples (1949) includes seven interlocking stories that trace life in the fictional Morgana, Mississippi, from the turn of the century until the late 1940s. Set in the Mississippi Delta of 1923, though published in 1946, the book was originally criticized as a nostalgic portrait of the plantation South, but critical opinion has since counteracted such views, seeing in the novel, to use Albert Devlin’s words, the “probing for a humane order.” Then came Delta Wedding, her first novel. A year after this novella appeared, Welty published a third book of fiction, stories that were collected as The Wide Net (1943) and that were fewer in number and more darkly lyrical than those in her first volume.
In 1942, Welty followed with a very different book, a novella partaking of folklore, fairy tale, and Mississippi’s legendary history. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing - it’s the way they should be written about.” Toni Morrison has observed that Eudora Welty wrote “about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. Here she at times translated into fiction memories of people and places she had earlier photographed, and the volume’s three stories focusing upon African American characters exemplify the empathy that was present in her photos. In A Curtain of Green, Welty included seventeen stories that move from the comic to the tragic, from realistic portraits to surrealistic ones, and that display a wry wit, the keen observation of detail, and a sure rendering of dialect. Her first book was published five years later. Her first publication was instead a short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” In 1936, the editor of Manuscript literary magazine called it “one of the best stories we have ever read.”
During these years, she took many photographs, and in 19 they were exhibited in New York but they were not published as she had wished. From Wisconsin, Welty went on to graduate study at the Columbia University School of Business.Īfter her college years, Welty worked at WJDX radio station, wrote society columns for the MemphisCommercial Appeal, and served as a Junior Publicity Agent for the Works Progress Administration. Her collegiate years were spent first at the Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus and then at the University of Wisconsin, where she received her bachelor’s degree. She attended Davis Elementary School when Miss Lorena Duling was principal and graduated from Jackson’s Central High School in 1925. Nourished by such a background, Welty became perhaps the most distinguished graduate of the Jackson Public School system.
With her brothers, Edward Jefferson Welty and Walter Andrews Welty, she shared bonds of devotion, camaraderie, and humor. From her father she inherited a “love for all instruments that instruct and fascinate,” from her mother a passion for reading and for language. Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty, Eudora Welty grew up in a close-knit and loving family.