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BACKGROUND
- Jackson, Mississippi
- “sheltered life” (by her own account)
- close-knit family
- 2 brothers
- Chestina = mother, also schoolteacher
- Christian Welty = father, from Ohio farm,
schoolteacher in WV
- moved to Jackson, MI to improve finances
- in insurance (started as book-keeper, advanced to
president)
- Education:
- 1925-27: Mississippi State College for
Women
- 1927-29: University of Wisconsin (B.A.)
- 1930-31: Columbia University Graduate
School of Business (NYC)
- advertising
- b/c her father didn’t think she could make a living as a
writer
- DIRECT INFLUENCE on her
WRITING
- during the peak of The Harlem Renaissance
- attended many social events in Harlem & throughout NYC
(plays, dances)
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BACKGROUND
- 1931: father died, returned home to
Jackson
- journalist, copywriter: & small jobs at
local newspapers & radio station (started by her father)
- *publicity agent for WPA (Works
Progress Administration)
- photographer
- traveled all over Mississippi
- Depression-era
- poorest state in USA
- met & photographed people of all classes in
various walks of life
- DIRECT INFLUENCE on her
WRITING
- “Death of a Traveling Salesman”
- “Why I Live at the P.O.”
- “A Worn Path”
- “Petrified Man”
- 1973: Pulitzer
Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)
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THEMES
- love
- tolerance & generosity help to adapt to others’ foibles
- family
- community
- community of the self:
- alienation
- (not necessarily bad)
- sometimes we need to be alone
- place:
- family
- & land
- where we come from
- community
- influences of family & the land
- race & racism
- fleeting joys of childhood
- stages of women’s lives
- self-sacrifice
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THEMES
- although a Regionalist,
- most of her themes = universal
- most Modern themes
=
- alienation
- (in a negative sense)
- sad, depressing, existential,
- lonely, isolated, estranged
- failure of love
- BUT not EW
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STYLE
- Regionalist (Mississippi)
- ear for dialect
- South’s oral tradition
- grotesque
- folk writer
- Mississippi history + folk stories (tall tales &
fairytales)
- classical mythology
- legends
- folk tales
- where history & romance intersect
- realism (early work)
- impressionism:
- symbolism & metaphor (later)
- humor, comic (irony)
- the grotesque
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STYLE
- “Welty's work typically explores the intricacies of the
interior life”
(CA)
- As Ruth Vande Kieft explained in Eudora Welty, the
stories "are largely concerned with
the mysteries of the inner life,
the enigma of man's being--his relation to the
universe; what is secret, concealed, inviolable in
any human being, resulting in distance or separation
between human beings; the puzzles and difficulties we have
about our own feelings, our meaning, and our identity." (CA)
- “the small heroisms of
ordinary people” (CA)
- unique combination of realistic and modernist
traditions: "Her work reflects the careful disorder
of Chekhovian fiction and the accurate yet spontaneous
rendering of detail that
belonged to [Anton Chekhov's]
slice of life technique. It reflects
the modernism, . . . that characterized Woolf's fiction: The
door she opened for Welty, she herself had passed through
with [James] Joyce, [Franz] Kafka, [Marcel] Proust, [Robert]
Musil, and the other twentieth-century makers of
experimental, avant-garde fiction." (CA)
- “Welty's fictional chronicle of Mississippi life
adds a major comic vision to American
literature, a vision that affirms the sustaining power of
community and
family life
and at the same time explores the
need for solitude.”
(CA)
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LINKS
LINKS
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