Welty, Eudora - Introduction

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Eudora Welty 1909–-2001
American novelist, short story writer, photographer, and essayist. See also, "A Worn Path" Criticism.

 

INTRODUCTION
Welty is recognized as an important contemporary American author of short fiction. Although the majority of her stories are set in the American South and reflect the region's language and culture, Welty's treatment of universal themes and her wide-ranging artistic influences clearly transcend regional boundaries. Welty is frequently linked with modernist authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and some of her works, including the stories in The Golden Apples (1949), are similar in their creation of complex fictional worlds that are only made comprehensible through a network of symbols and allusions, drawn primarily from classical mythology. Some features of Welty's best-known stories are an authentic replication of southern dialect, as in the story “Why I Live at the P.O.” from Welty's A Curtain of Green (1941), a skillful manipulation of realistic detail, and the application of elements of fantasy to create vivid character portraits.

Biographical Information
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, at a time when the city had not yet lost its rural atmosphere, Welty grew up in the bucolic South she so often evoked in her stories. She attended the Mississippi State College for Women and the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in English literature; Welty also studied advertising at Columbia University. However, graduating at the height of the Depression, she was unable to find work and returned to Jackson in 1931. There Welty worked as a part-time journalist and copywriter, and as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) publicity agent. Welty's WPA job took her on assignments reporting and interviewing throughout Mississippi, during which she took hundreds of photographs of ordinary citizens. It was the profundity of these experiences that first inspired Welty to seriously write short stories. In June 1936 her story “Death of a Traveling Salesman” was accepted for publication in the Detroit journal Manuscript and within two years her work appeared in such prestigious publications as the Atlantic and the Southern Review. Critical response to Welty's first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green, was mostly favorable, with many commentators predicting that a first performance so impressive would no doubt lead to even greater achievements. Yet when The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943) was published two years later, several critics, most notably Diana Trilling, deplored Welty's marked shift away from the colorful realism of her earlier stories toward a more impressionistic style, objecting in particular to her increased use of symbol and metaphor to convey theme. Other critics responded positively, including Robert Penn Warren, who wrote that in Welty's work, “the items of fiction (scene, action, character, etc.) are presented not as document but as comment, not as a report but as a thing made, not as history but as idea.” As Welty continued to refine her vision, her fictional techniques gained wider acceptance. Indeed, her most complex and highly symbolic collection of stories, The Golden Apples, won much acclaim and Welty received a number of prizes and awards throughout the following decade, including the William Dean Howells Medal of the Academy of Arts and Letters for her novella The Ponder Heart (1954). Occupied primarily with teaching, traveling, and lecturing between 1955 and 1970, Welty produced little fiction. Then, in the early 1970s, she published two novels, Losing Battles (1970), which received mixed reviews, and the more critically successful novelette The Optimist's Daughter (1972), which won a Pulitzer Prize. While Welty did not publish any new volumes of short stories after The Bride of the Innisfallen in 1955, the release of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in 1980 renewed interest in her short fiction and brought critical praise. In addition, the 1984 publication of Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, an autobiographical chronicle of her artistic development, further illuminated her oeuvre and inspired commentators to reinterpret many of her past stories. Welty died in her birthplace, Jackson, Mississippi, on July 23, 2001. Author Richard Ford, a fellow southerner and past neighbor of Welty's, has been named literary executor of her estate and will decide whether to issue any new work by Welty who ceased publishing in 1973, but continued to write until her death.

Major Works
In his seminal 1944 essay on The Wide Net, and Other Stories, Robert Penn Warren located the essence of Welty's fictive technique in a phrase from her story “First Love”: “Whatever happened, it happened in extraordinary times, in a season of dreams.” It is, states Warren, “as though the author cannot be quite sure what did happen, cannot quite undertake to resolve the meaning of the recorded event.” This tentative approach to narrative exegesis suggests Welty's primary goal in creating fiction, which was not to simply relate a series of events, but to convey a strong sense of her character's experience in a specific moment in time, always acknowledging the ambiguous nature of reality. In order to do so, Welty selected those details that can best vivify the tale, frequently using metaphors and similes to communicate sensory impressions, while revealing only those incidents that enter her characters' inwardness. The resulting stories are highly impressionistic. Welty typically used traditional symbols and mythical allusions in her work, and in the opinion of many it is through linking the particular with the general and the mundane with the metaphysical that she attained her transcendent vision of being. Welty's stories display a marked diversity in content, form, and mood. Many of her stories are facile and humorous, while others employ the tragic and the grotesque. Her jocular stories frequently rely on the comic possibilities of language, as in both “Why I Live at the P.O.” and The Ponder Heart, which both exploit the levity in the speech pattern and colorful idiom of their southern narrators. In addition, Welty also used irony to comic effect and many critics consider this aspect of her work to be one of its chief strengths. Opinions are divided, however, on the effectiveness of Welty's use of the fantastic. While Trilling and others find inclusion of such elements as the carnival exhibits in “Petrified Man,” from A Curtain of Green, exploitative and superfluous, Eunice Glenn maintains that in the story Welty created “scenes of horror” in order to “make everyday life appear as it often does, without the use a magnifying glass, to the person with extraordinary acuteness of feeling.”

Critical Reception
Critics of Welty's work agree that the same literary techniques that produced her finest stories have also been the cause of her most outstanding failures, noting that she is at her best when objective observation and subjective revelation are kept in balance, and that where the former is neglected, she is ineffective. Commentators remark further, however, that such instances are comparatively rare in Welty's work. Many contemporary critics consider Welty's skillful use of language her single greatest achievement, citing in particular the poetic richness of her narratives and her acute sensitivity to the subtleties and peculiarities of human speech. The majority of reviewers concur with Glenn's assertion that “it is her profound search of human consciousness and her illumination of the underlying causes of the compulsions and fears of modern man that would seem to comprise the principal value of Welty's work.”Eudora Welty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Please help improve this article by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (January 2009)

Eudora Welty

Born     Eudora Alice Welty

April 13, 1909

Jackson, Mississippi, United States

Died     July 23, 2001 (aged 92)

Jackson, Mississippi, United States

Occupation       Author, photographer

Notable award(s)          Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

1973 The Optimist's Daughter

 Literature portal
Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi, is a National Historic Landmark and open to the public as a museum.Contents [hide]

1 Photography

2 Writing career

3 Honors

4 Short story collections

5 Novels

6 Literary criticism and non-fiction

7 Commemoration

8 See also

9 References

10 Additional reading

11 External links
During the 1930s, Welty worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her around Mississippi. On her own time, she took some memorable photographs during the Great Depression of people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs were published as One Time, One Place (1971) and Photographs (1989). Her photography was the basis for several of her short stories, including "Why I Live at PO", which was inspired by a woman she photographed ironing in the back of a small post office.

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Writing career
Welty was focused on her writing but continued to take photographs until the 1950s.[1] Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman", appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of author Katherine Anne Porter. Porter became a mentor to Welty and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the stories "Why I Live at the P.O.", "Petrified Man", and "A Worn Path".
Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973. In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story.
Welty was a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. She also taught creative writing at colleges and in workshops. She lived near Jackson's Belhaven College and was a common sight among the people of her hometown.

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Honors

1954 - William Dean Howells medal for fiction, The Ponder Heart[2]

1973 - Pulitzer Prize, The Optimist's Daughter

1980 - Presidential Medal of Freedom[3]

1983 - Invited by Harvard University to give the first annual Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization[4]

1986 - National Medal of Arts.

1991 - National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters[5]

1991 - Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award[5][6]

1992 - Rea Award for the Short Story[7]

1993 - Charles Frankel Prize, National Endowment for the Humanities[7]

1993 - PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story[7]

1993 - Distinguished Alumni Award, American Association of State Colleges and Universities[7]

1996 - French Légion d’Honneur[8]

1998 - First living author to have her works published in the prestigious Library of America series.[4]

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Short story collections

"Death of a Traveling Salesman" (separate short story), 1936

"A Worn Path" (separate short story), 1940

A Curtain of Green, 1941

The Wide Net and Other Stories, 1943

Music from Spain, 1948

The Golden Apples, 1949

Selected Stories, 1954

The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, 1955

Thirteen Stories, 1965

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1982

Moon Lake and Other Stories, 1980

Morgana: Two Stories from The Golden Apples, 1988

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Novels

The Robber Bridegroom (novella), 1942

Delta Wedding, 1946

The Ponder Heart, 1954

The Shoe Bird (juvenile), 1964

Losing Battles, 1970

The Optimist's Daughter, 1972

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Literary criticism and non-fiction

Three Papers on Fiction (criticism), 1962

The Eye of the Story (selected essays and reviews), 1978

One Writer's Beginnings (autobiography), 1983

The Norton Book of Friendship (editor, with Roland A. Sharp), 1991

3 Minutes or Less (selected essay), 2001

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Commemoration

Eudora, the name given to the Internet email program developed by Steve Dorner in 1990, was inspired by Welty's story "Why I Live at the P.O."[9]

The state of Mississippi established a "Eudora Welty Day."

Each October, Mississippi University for Women hosts the Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium to promote and celebrate the work of contemporary Southern writers.[10]
The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning 1972 short novel by Eudora Welty. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. He fails to recover from the surgery, though, surrenders to his age, and dies slowly as Laurel reads to him from Dickens. Her father's second wife Fay, who is younger than Laurel, is a shrewish outsider from Texas. Her shrill response to the Judge's illness appears to accelerate his demise. Laurel and Fay are thrown together when they return the Judge to his home town of Mount Salus, Mississippi, where he will be buried. There, Laurel is immersed in the enveloping good neighborliness of the friends and family she knew before marrying and moving away to Chicago. Fay, though, has always been unwelcome and takes off for a long weekend, leaving Laurel in the big house full of memories. Laurel encounters her mother's memory, her father's life after he lost his first wife, and the complex emotions surrounding her loss and the wave of memories in which she swims. She comes to a place of understanding that Fay can never share, and leaves small town Mississippi with the memories she can carry with her.[1]Contents [hide]

1 The Optimist's Daughter Summary

2 Main characters

2.1 Laurel Hand

2.2 Fay McKelva

2.3 Judge (Clint) McKelva

2.4 Becky McKelva

3 Web sources
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The Optimist's Daughter Summary
The book begins with the main character Laurel Hand who travels to New Orleans from her home in Chicago to assist her aging father as a family friend operates on his eye. Laurel’s father (Judge Clint McKelva) remains in the hospital for recovery for several weeks. During this time, Laurel begins to get to know her outsider stepmother (Fay McKelva) better, as she rarely visited her father since the two were married. Fay begins to show her true colors as the Judge’s condition worsens. To the distress of all who knew him, the Judge dies after his wife throws a violently emotional fit in the hospital.
The two women travel back to the Judge’s home in Mount Salus Mississippi for the funeral and are received by close friends of the family. Here, Laurel finds love and friendship in a community which she left after childhood. Ironically, the warmth of the town clashes with Fay’s dissenting and antagonistic personality. The woman from Texas, who claimed to have no family other than the Judge, is soon confronted by her past as her mother, siblings, and other members of her family show up to her house to attend the funeral. Though Laurel confronts Fay as to the reason for which she lied, she cannot help but feel anything except pity for the lonely, sullen woman. Directly after her husband’s funeral, Fay leaves to go back home to Madrid, Texas with her family.
After her distraught and immature stepmother leaves, Laurel finally has time to herself in the house she grew up in with the friends and neighbors she knew since childhood. During the few days she remains, Laurel digs through the past as she goes through her house remembering her deceased parents and the life she had before she left Mount Salus. She rediscovers the life of friendship and love that she left behind so many years ago, along with heartache.
Her visit to her hometown and the memories of her parents open up a new insight on life for Laurel. She leaves Mount Salus with a new understanding of life and the factors which influence it the most—friends and family. But most of all, she gains a new understanding and respect for herself.

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Main characters

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Laurel Hand
Laurel is Judge McKelva’s daughter, who is an only child. She is a widow having once been married to a man named Phil Hand. After his death, Laurel returned to her parents’ home because of her mother’s sickness, before returning to Chicago, only to be brought back by her father’s condition which is where the events in the novel begin. In the story Laurel and Fay have many arguments because of Fay’s rude personality. After her father’s death, the funeral, and Fay’s unexpected vacation, Laurel returns to her father’s home. There she reminisces about past memories, including those of her parents, and her fear of birds, before she comes to her epiphany about life.

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Fay McKelva
Fay is Judge McKelva’s second wife, therefore Laurel’s stepmother. Judge McKelva met her at the Southern Bar Association at the old Gulf Coast hotel where Fay had a part time job at the time. However, Fay is also younger than Laurel. Fay’s personality is not pleasant and causes everyone in the story to see her as obnoxious, self-centered, and rude. This causes the other characters in the novel to pity her. In the course of the story we see that Fay is also dishonest, lying about having a family—she had said that they were dead—but when they come for Clint’s funeral, they clearly are not. After the funeral Fay makes a snap decision to return to Texas with her family for a short time before returning at the end of the novel.

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Judge (Clint) McKelva
Clint McKelva is Laurel’s father, who is an optimist. Judge McKelva is being treated for an eye illness he has, he dies after eye surgery and other complications much to the distress of everyone who had known him. In the book we learn more about him after he dies, including of his already deceased first wife, Becky, as well as the occupation he held as a judge.

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Becky McKelva
Is Laurel’s mother and Clint’s first wife. She died before the events in the story occurred, but through the memories of Laurel, she plays a large role at the end of the story.

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Web sources

^ New York TimesAwards

Preceded by

Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner       Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

1973     Succeeded by

1974:no award given

1975:The Killer Angels

by Michael Shaara
Categories: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction | 1972 novels | Novellas | American novels | Novels by Eudora
Eudora Welty
Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909.
(At the moment, I give the titles, year of publication, publisher, ISBN where I have it, and the blurb that appears on the edition that I have. I've also included Links to other relevant sites.)

"I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."

Novels

 The Robber Bridegroom (1942, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1982, Virago Press, with an introduction by Paul Binding [ISBN: 0 86068 290 0])

"`Rosamond's hair lay out behind her, and Jamie's hair was flying too... Red as blood the horse rode the ridge, his mane and tail straight out in the wind, and it was the finest kidnapping that had ever been in that part of the country'
"Once upon a time, many many years ago in old Mississippi, there lived a beautiful young girl whose name was Rosamond. She lived in a house in the woods with her father Clement Musgrove and her evil stepmother Salome, whose jealousy of Rosamond knew no bounds. One day, thinking to do her harm, Salome bade Rosamond go far into the depths of the wood. Pinning up her long gold hair and donning her new silk dress, the green of sugar cane, Rosamond set off -- there to meet her fate, in the shape of Jamie Lockhart, the dashing young bandit...
"First published in 1942, The Robber Bridegroom is a wild, rich fantasy peopled with legendary figures as memorable as Little Red-Riding Hood [sic], Rapunzel, and Buffalo Bill. Hilarious and poetic, this rollicking fairy tale is at once acid and gentle, wise and gay."
 Delta Wedding (1945, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1982, Virago Press, with an introduction by Paul Binding [ISBN: 0 86068 289 7])

"`His hands took her by the hair and pulled her up like a turnip. On top of the water he looked at her intently, his eyelashes thorny and dripping at her... "I couldn't believe you wouldn't come right up," said Roy suddenly, "I thought girls floated."'
"On the tenth of September 1923 little motherless Laura McRaven travels from Jackson, Mississippi, on a train named the Yellow Dog. She is returning to Shellmound, the family plantation at the heart of the Mississippi delta. There she is swept into the arms of the Fairchilds, her huge collection of entrancing, breathtaking relatives. They have gathered for the marriage of seventeen-year-old Dabney - the prettiest of the Fairchild girls - to a man from the mountains: the overseer Troy Flavin. The ordinary events in the life of this clannish, proud, loving, and quarrelling family are wonderfully portrayed as the great day draws nearer and Dabney's perfect moment lights up the lives of cousins and uncles, aunts and great-aunts, young and old.
"[...] First published in 1945, Delta Wedding is both a wonderfully entertaining portrait of an ebullient Southern family and an exquisitely woven celebration of Southern life."
 The Ponder Heart (1953, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1983, Virago Press, with an introduction by Helen McNeil [ISBN: 0 86068 365 6])

"`I said, "Dear heart, I know the asylum's no place for you, but neither is the top of a real high mountain or a cave in the cold dark ground. Here's the place." And he said, "All right, Edna Earle, but make me some candy."'
"Edna Earle's Uncle Daniel Ponder is quite a character in the town of Clay, Mississippi: he carries a Stetson, dresses fit to kill in a snow white suit, and is as good as gold -- everyone will admit that. But the trouble with Uncle Ponder is he's as rich as Croesus and a great deal too generous. He gave Edna Earle a hotel, and once he even tried to give away his own lot in a cemetery. But when his first marriage to Miss `Teacake' Magee didn't work out, he needed someone else to give things to. So he married seventeen-year-old Bonnie Dee Peacock from a poor backwoods family who `could cut hair and looked as though a good gust of wind might carry her off'. She was carried off, but not by the wind -- and the result, related in Edna Earle's rattling tongue, is a masterpiece of comic absurdity: an uproarious tale of small town life and the deeply eccentric Ponder family.
"First published in 1954, this spellbindingly funny novel was awarded the Howells Medal for Fiction."

 Losing Battles (1970, Random House; 1986, Virago Press [ISBN: 0 86068 761 9])

   "`"It's a bigger reunion than I ever dreamed, congratulations," said Aunt Cleo.

   "Listen!" Aunt Nanny cried, "But it ain't started yet, Cleo"'
"On the hot dry first Sunday of August, three generations of Granny Vaughn's descendants gather at her home in Banner, Mississippi, for a family reunion in celebration of her ninetieth birthday. The action covers two days, but in memory many decades, for the members of this enormous family are wonderful raconteurs. Through a myriad of raised voices we enter their world - both present and past - and as this magnificently orchestrated novel rises to its crescendo, Eudora Welty subtly reveals that battles seemingly lost can also be secretly won.
"In this [novel], first published in 1970, she draws on a lifetime's observation of the people of her native region to produce her finest work of fiction."
(On a personal note, this was the first of her novels that I read, and it overwhelmed me -- if you haven't yet read it, do so, immediately... You'll not rgret it.)

 The Optimist's Daughter (1973, Andre Deutsch; 1984, Virago Press, with an introduction by Helen McNeil [ISBN: 0 86068 375 3])

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"`The guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.'
"For a long time Judge McKelva was seen as a reassuring figure by the many who knew and liked him. They looked at him, with his wife Becky and daughter Laurel, and they felt good: that was how well-bred people in Mount Salus, Mississippi, ought to be. When, yen years after his wife's death, the Judge marries silly young Fay everyone is disconcerted: but a lonely old man can be allowed at least one folly. For Laurel, however, her father's remarriage is a difficult an puzzling betrayal. Years later, circumstance brings Laurel back from Chicago: first to New Orleans, then to Mount Salus and the old house of her childhood. It is only here, alone with her memories, that Laurel can finally come to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents."
Welty's One Writer's Beginnings is a remarkably useful account of her origins and development as a writer, and her essays on her own reading or on the art of writing, collected in some of the volumes listed above, are excellent testaments to her sources, her Masters, and her practice and standards as a writer.   More biographical detail about her can be found in Ruth Vande Kieft's Eudora Welty, rev. edition (Twayne, 1987), Albert Devlin's Eudora Welty's Chronicle: A Story of Mississippi Life (1983), and Michael Kreyling's Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell (1991). 
Vande Kieft's Twayne book remains an extremely useful general introduction to the analysis of Welty's fiction, and Michael Kreyling's Eudora Welty's Achievement of Order, a more modern perspective, has been well received. Several useful collections of individual essays on Welty's writing are available: Eudora Welty: A Form of Thanks, ed. Louis Dollarhide and Ann J. Abadie (UP of Miss, 1979), Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (Jackson: U Press of Mississippi, 1979), and Eudora Welty: Thirteen Essays, ed. Prenshaw (U P of Miss, 1983; a selection from the previous volume, published  in paperback); Welty: A Life in Literature, ed. Albert J. Devlin (Jackson: U P of Miss, 1987; a reprinting of the 1986 special number of Mississippi Quarterly); Critical Essays on Eudora Welty, ed. W. Craig Turner and Lee Emling Harding (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989),and Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller, ed. Dawn Trouard (Kent, OH; KentState UP, 1989).  The Mississippi Quarterly has devoted two special issues to essays on Welty (1973, 1986, with another planned soon). 
Welty scholarship in this country and abroad is growing in quantity and in sophistication and is too voluminous to summarize here.  Readers seeking titles of articles on specific Welty works and books on Welty's writing should consult the checklists of scholarship and criticism about Welty that have appeared in the special issues of Mississippi Quarterly (Checklists for 1936-1972 and 1973-1986, which also include reference to Welty's own published works, appear in Welty: A Life in Literature.).  New checklists appear annually in the Eudora Welty Newsletter and in the Southern Bibliography published by Mississippi Quarterly.  Summaries, with critical judgments, of much Welty scholarship appear in the on-going series of  volumes American Literary Scholarship:An Annual (Duke University Press). 
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HONORS AND AWARDS
A Lifetime of Honors for Eudora Welty: A Checklist of Awards

by Elaine Saino
[This article originally appeared in our Winter 1997 issue.

Addenda have been added for newly uncovered honors.]
To honor someone is to hold that person in esteem, to show respect, and to mark the person with distinction. The privilege and burden of such an appropriate pause of recognition rested with Eudora Welty on May 24, 1962, when she presented William Faulkner with The Gold Medal for Fiction given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She said, "Mr. Faulkner, I think this medal, being pure of its kind, the real gold, would go to you of its own accord, and know its owner regardless of whether we were all here to see or not. Safe as a puppy it would climb into your pocket . . ." (Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Second Series. Number 13. New York: 1963: 226). Welty is fond of telling the story that the medal was indeed already in Faulkner's pocket as she spoke. She had passed it to him during dinner and presented an empty box.
Before Welty received her own Gold Medal for Fiction in 1972, she had many other moments of appreciation. In looking at the following checklist of Eudora Welty's lifetime awards, one can see that over many years, Welty has been honored by national governments, colleges and universities, magazines, local institutions. It is obvious that her appeal is universal as her admirers have no limiting common denominator except a love of her work.
This list includes local, regional, national, and international honors for individual stories and novels as well as for lifetime achievement. The list is culled from Noel Polk's Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), where the day and month are often given, and from past Eudora Welty Newsletters, where fuller reports of awards, including descriptions and names of other recipients, may be found. Please notify the Eudora Welty Newsletter of any corrections or additional awards that merit inclusion for a future update.
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EUDORA WELTY: AWARDS AND HONORS
1920  Silver Badge, St. Nicholas Magazine, for a drawing "A Heading for August." 

1921  $25 prize in "Jackie Mackie Jingles Contest."
1935  Gold Badge, St. Nicholas Magazine, for a poem "In the Twilight." 

1938  "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in The Best American Short Stories of 1938. 

1939  "A Curtain of Green" in The Best American Short Stories of 1939. 

1939  "Petrified Man" in Prize Stories 1939: The O. Henry Awards. 
1940  "The Hitchhikers" in Best American Short Stories 1940. 

1940  Bread Loaf Fellowship for the upcoming summer. 

1941  Yaddo Writers' Conference, Saratoga Springs, New York. 

1941  "A Worn Path" in Prize Stories 1941: The O. Henry Awards. 

1942  Guggenheim Fellowship. 

1942  "The Wide Net" in Prize Stories 1942: The O. Henry Awards, second place. 

1943  "Asphodel" in The Best American Short Stories of 1943. 

1943  "Livvie Is Back" in Prize Stories 1943: The O. Henry Awards, first place. 

1944  American Academy of Arts and Letters, $1000 prize. 

1946  "A Sketching Trip" in Prize Stories 1946: The O. Henry Awards. 

1947  "The Whole World Knows" in Prize Stories 1947: The O. Henry Awards. 

1949  Guggenheim fellowship renewal. 
1951  "The Burning" in Prize Stories 1951: The O. Henry Awards, second place. 

1952  Election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. 

1954  Honorary LL.D. from the University of Wisconsin. 

1955  Howells Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for The Ponder Heart.

1955  Honorary LL.D. from Western College for Women 

1956  Honorary LL.D. from Smith College. 

1957  "A Flock of Guinea Hens Seen from a Car" in Best Poems of 1957. 

1958  Honorary Consultant to Library of Congress. 

1958  Lucy Donnelley Fellowship Award from Bryn Mawr College. 
1960  Ford Foundation grant for two seasons of observation and study at New York's Phoenix Theatre. 

1962  Henry Bellamann Memorial Foundation for contribuiton to American Letters. The award of $1,000 was presented at Mississippi College, Clinton.  

1966  Creative Arts Medal for Fiction from Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. 

1968  "The Demonstrators" in Prize Stories 1968: The O. Henry Awards, first place.

 

1970  Edward MacDowell Medal. 

1971  Doctor of Letters degree from the University of the South. 

1972  Election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

1972  Gold Medal for Fiction of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.  

1973  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Optimist's Daughter.

1975  Honorary Degree from Newcomb College, New Orleans, Louisiana.

1975  Honorary Degree from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.

1979  Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Illinois-Urbana.

1979  National Medal for

Literature for 1979 from the

American Book Award. 
Pearl McHaney accepting an

award on behalf of Eudora Welty.
1980  Medal of Freedom given by Jimmy Carter.

1981  Honorary Degree from William Carey College, Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

1981  Medal of Excellence from Mississippi University for Women (formerly Mississippi State College for Women). 

1982  Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Studies established at Millsaps College. 

1982  Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Columbia University. 

1983  St. Louis Literary Award from Associates of St. Louis Libraries. 

1984  Eudora Welty New Playwrights Series established at the New Stage Theatre of Jackson. 

1984  Common Wealth Award from the Modern Language Association. 

1984  Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Fiction for lifetime achievement in arts and letters. 

1984  The Lillian Smith Special Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Regional Council of Atlanta. 

1986  Grand Master Award from the Birmingham-Southern Writer's Conference. 

1986  National Medal of Arts for contributions to the nation's culture from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

1986  The Eudora Welty Library, a branch of the Jackson Metropolitan Library, dedicated. 

1987  French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres medal. 

1987  Authors Award from the Mississippi Library Association. 

1987  Sesquicentennial Medal from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass. 

1987  Appalachian Gold Medallion from the University of Charleston, Charleston, West Virginia. 

1988  Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Lifetime Achievement Award. 

1988  Honorary doctorate from Princeton University. 

1989  Phi Beta Kappa Associates Award. 

1989  Selected to have portrait hung in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution by the National Portrait Gallery Commission. 
1991  The Corrington Award from the Department of English at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. 

1991  Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award from the Tulsa Library Trust. 

1991  Cleanth Brooks Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Southern Letters from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. 

1991  National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

1991  PEN-Malamud Award for Excellence in The Short Story. 

1992  Frankel Humanities Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

1992  Distinguished Alumni Award from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. 

1993  Honorary Degree from the University of Burgundy, France. 

1994  Richard Wright Literary Prize from Copiah-Lincoln Community College, Wesson, Mississippi. 

1996  French Légion d'Honneur. 

1998  Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Mississippi University for Women (formerly Mississippi State College for Women) in Columbus. 

1998  The Mayor's Arts Achievement Honors from the Arts Alliance of Jackson and Hinds County in Jackson, Mississippi. 

1999  Distinguished Achievement Award from the Southern Book Critics Circle. го: Millwall как [mɪowɔː] «миоуо».

Short Stories

 The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1981, Marion Boyars; 1983, Penguin Books [ISBN: 0 14 009318 4])

Includes:

A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941)

The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943)

The Golden Apples (1949)

The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955)

Two previously uncollected stories:

Where is the voice coming from?

The Demonstrators

"`I try,' Eudora Welty writes, `to enter the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination I set most high.'

"This collection amply demonstrates Eudora Welty's magnificent talent for inhabiting the inner world of her characters, whether it is a deaf-mute child, a beautician, a jazz player, or a murderer. The events and settings of these stories are varied, ranging from small-town Jackson to plusher New Orleans, from the Depression years to the Sixties, yet they all spring from a distinctive Southern sensibility, from the author's response to the place where she has always lived, which she brings to life with the grace, strength, and intelligence of a born story-teller."
The steady growth of criticism concerning Eudora Welty and her works has recently escalated into what one reviewer christens a "Welty Bloom" (Jon Smith, "The Welty Bloom!" Contemporary Literature 36 [1995]: 553), with eight new books published in the past year. Among them, Laurie Champion's second volume in the Greenwood Press Critical Responses in Arts and Letters series is the only one to offer a backward glance at the contemporary reception of her work. Despite the book's length, however, the ambitious series premise of providing a "documentary history of highlights in the critical reception" seems to be imperfectly realized, although readers should find merit in the new essays included and in the representation of well-known voices in Welty scholarship.

More

Articles of Interest

Toward the north star: Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" and the slave...

Cinematic rhythms in the short fiction of Eudora Welty

Playing in the dark with Welty: The symbolic role of African Americans in...

Eudora Welty: A Study Of The Short Fiction. - Review - book reviews

Death of the Author: Eudora Welty's Canonical Status, The

 
The chronologically arranged contents generally feature a pair of contemporary reviews and at least one piece of secondary criticism concerning each Welty novel or short story collection. Champion also includes sections of "General Criticism" for those longer intervals during which Welty published no fiction, yet with the 14-year period from 1955-69 represented by a single article and essays from the other intervals included in the sections on individual works, this structural device has limited effectiveness. While Champion has the advantage of following recent bibliographic work on Welty, the rationale behind her selection of reviews is not entirely clear without a comprehensive bibliography. Reviews on the early works tend to be taken almost exclusively from Nation and New Republic, both of which would be easily accessible in most libraries with large enough budgets to purchase this expensive volume. The major advantage of this choice is that it allows inclusion of the opinions of such literary commentators as Kay Boyle, Louise Bogan, and Diana and Lionel Trilling. On later volumes, Champion leans heavily on the Jackson Clarion-Ledger--a much less accessible source--but thus excludes more of the voices beyond the South as Welty's recognition transcends her native region.
One of the volume's main strengths is the inclusion of prominent critics such as Cleanth Brooks, Louis Rubin, Charles May, and John Idol, as well as many whose reputations are well-respected in the Welty circle, such as Neil Isaacs, Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Peggy Prenshaw, Albert Devlin, and Dawn Trouard. The latter two critics both contribute new essays to the volume: Devlin explores the experimental "No Place for You, My Love" as a "fable of creativity" that subverts the mythic quest narrative, while Trouard reads "A Piece of News" and "Circe" as portrayals of women's radical survival strategies rather than tales of victimization. After skimming the book's very selective bibliography, however, readers will invariably question certain omissions among the essay selections, despite the attempt to represent major voices and provide some foundation in the criticism of the past three decades.

 
Someone (I'm not sure who, nor how legally) has placed one of Eudora Welty's short stories on the WWW - A Worn Path.

Autobiography

 One Writer's Beginnings (1984, Harvard University Press; 1985, Faber & Faber [ISBN: 0 571 13554 4])

"The William E. Massey Sr Lectures in the History of American Civilisation, 1983"
"In a `continuous thread of revelation', she sketches her childhood and describes how she became a writer. Evocative, humorous, and moving, One Writer's Beginnings is an exploration of memory by one of America's finest living writers, whose m any honours include the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award for Fiction, and the Gold Medal for the Novel."

Essays

 The Eye of the Story (1978)

Photographs

 One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album (1971)

Links to Other Welty Sites

Mississippi Writers Page: Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty on the Internet, from the Centre for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

Eudora Welty - a nicely organised and presented site produced by Starkville High School, Starkville, MS.

Skцnlitteratur;Utlдndska berдttare; Welty, Eudora: Junikonsert
Обзор книгиThis story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations. "The Optimist's Daughter" is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.
Обзоры

Отзыв редактора - Kirkus Reviews Copyright (c) VNU Business Media, Inc.

Those who didn't enjoy the topsyturvy eccentricity of Losing Battles will be happy to find Miss Welty back in the changeless countryside of her earlier short novels where memory is the eternal revenant keeping alive places and people often in the mortmain of the past. Thus Laurel returns home, after the death of her mother, after her father has remarried the common Wanda Fay, as he lies in a ...
Edward Albee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Edward Albee
Edward Albee, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1961

Born     12 March 1928 (age 81)

Washington D.C.

Occupation       Dramatist

Nationality        American

Writing period   1958–present

Notable work(s)           Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The Zoo Story

The American Dream

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

Notable award(s)          Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1967,1975,1994)

Tony Award (2002)

National Medal of Arts (1996)

Special Tony Award (2005)
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]
Edward Franklin Albee III (pronounced /ˈɔːlbiː/ AWL-bee; born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance and Three Tall Women. His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger American playwrights, such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in new works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).Contents [hide]

1 Biography

1.1 Honors

2 Plays

3 Essays

4 Quotes

5 Discography

6 Awards and nominations

7 References

8 External links
[edit]

Biography

 

Edward Albee at the Miami Book Fair International of 1987
According to Magill's Survey of American Literature (2007), Edward Albee was born somewhere in Virginia (the popular belief is that he was born in Washington, D.C.). He was adopted two weeks later and taken to Larchmont, New York in Westchester County, where he grew up. Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, the wealthy son of vaudeville magnate Edward Franklin Albee II, owned several theaters. Here the young Edward first gained familiarity with the theatre as a child. His adoptive mother, Reed's third wife, Frances tried to raise Albee to fit into their social circles.
Albee attended the Clinton High School in New York, then the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, from which he was expelled. He then was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1945 at the age of 17. He enrolled at The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, graduating in 1946. His formal education continued at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was expelled in 1947 for skipping classes and refusing to attend compulsory chapel. In response to his expulsion, Albee's play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is believed to be based on his experiences at Trinity College.
Albee left home for good when he was in his late teens. In a later interview, he said: "I never felt comfortable with the adoptive parents. I don't think they knew how to be parents. I probably didn't know how to be a son, either."[1] More recently, he told interviewer Charlie Rose that he was "thrown out" because his parents wanted him to become a "corporate gangsta and didn't approve of his aspirations to become a writer.[2]
Albee moved into New York's Greenwich Village, where he supported himself with odd jobs while learning to write plays. His first play, The Zoo Story, was first staged in Berlin. The less than diligent student later dedicated much of his time to promoting American university theatre. He frequently spoke at campuses and served as a distinguished professor at the University of Houston from 1989 to 2003.

[edit]

Honors
A member of the Dramatists Guild Council, Albee has received three Pulitzer Prizes for drama—for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994); a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement (2005); the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980); as well as the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts (both in 1996).
Albee is the President of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., which maintains the William Flanagan Creative Persons Center, a writers and artists colony in Montauk, New York. Albee's longtime partner, Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor, died on May 2, 2005, from bladder cancer.
In 2008, in celebration of Albee's eightieth birthday, a number of his plays were mounted in distinguished Off Broadway venues, including the historic Cherry Lane Theatre. The playwright directed two of his one-acts, The American Dream and The Sandbox there. These were first produced at the theater in 1961 and 1962, respectively.

[edit]

PlaysThe Zoo Story (1958)

The Death of Bessie Smith (1959)

The Sandbox (1959)

Fam and Yam (1959)

The American Dream (1960)

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961–1962)

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963) (adapted from the novella by Carson McCullers)

Tiny Alice (1964)

Malcolm (1965) (adapted from the novel by James Purdy)

A Delicate Balance (1966)

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966)

Everything in the Garden (1967)

Box (1968)

All Over (1971)

Seascape (1974)

Listening (1975)

Counting the Ways (1976)         The Lady From Dubuque (1977–1979)

Lolita (adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov) (1981)

The Man Who Had Three Arms (1981)

Finding the Sun (1982)

Marriage Play (1986–1987)

Three Tall Women (1990–1991)

The Lorca Play (1992)

Fragments (1993)

The Play About the Baby (1996)

The Goat or Who is Sylvia? (2002)

Occupant (2001)

Knock! Knock! Who's There!? (2003)

Peter & Jerry retitled in 2009 as At Home at the Zoo (Act One: Homelife. Act Two: The Zoo Story) (2004)

Me, Myself and I (2007)

At Home At The Zoo (2009)
[edit]

Essays

Stretching My Mind: Essays 1960–2005 (Avalon Publishing, 2005)

[edit]

Quotes This section is a candidate to be copied to Wikiquote using the Transwiki process. If the page can be expanded into an encyclopedic article, rather than a list of quotes, please do so and remove this message.
"What could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?"

"A usefully lived life is probably going to be, ultimately, more satisfying."[3]

"Writing should be useful. If it can't instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness there's no point in doing it."

"If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly."

"That's what happens in plays, yes? The shit hits the fan."

"Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely."[4]

"Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly."

[edit]

Discography

Mark Richman & William Daniels in The Zoo Story by Edward Albee - Directed by Arthur Luce Klein (LP, Spoken Arts SA 808)

[edit]

Awards and nominations

Awards

1960 Drama Desk Award Vernon Rice Award - The Zoo Story

1963 Tony Award for Best Play - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

1967 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - A Delicate Balance

1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - Seascape

1994 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - Three Tall Women

1996 National Medal of Arts

2002 Drama Desk Award Outstanding New Play - The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

2002 Tony Award for Best Play - The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

2005 Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement

2008 Drama Desk Award Special Award

Nominations

1964 Tony Award for Best Play - The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

1965 Tony Award for Best Author of a Play - Tiny Alice

1965 Tony Award for Best Play - Tiny Alice

1967 Tony Award for Best Play - A Delicate Balance

1975 Drama Desk Award Outstanding New Play - Seascape

1975 Tony Award for Best Play - Seascape

1976 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Director of a Play - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

1994 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Play - Three Tall Women

2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - The Play About the Baby

2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

2005 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Pulitzer Prize committee for the Best Play in 1963 recommended Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but the Pulitzer board, who have sole discretion in awarding the prize, rejected the recommendation, due to the play's perceived vulgarity, and no award was given that year.[5]

[edit]

References

^ "Edward Albee Interview", Academy of Achievement, June 2, 2005

^ "Albee interview", The Charlie Rose Show, May 27, 2008

^ Edward Albee Interview - page 6 / 6 - Academy of Achievement

^ Edward Albee - Me, Myself & I - Peter and Jerry - Theater - New York Times

^ Klein, Alvin. "Albee's 'Tiny Alice', The Whole Enchilada", The New York Times, 24 May 1998: CT11.

[edit]

External links    Literature portal
Edward Albee at the Internet Broadway Database

Edward Albee at the Internet Off-Broadway Database

Edward Albee at the Internet Movie Database

Guardian (UK) Profile of Edward Albee, The Guardian, 2004

"Edward Albee", The Paris Review

The William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center

"Interviews with Edward Albee", TonyAwards

Notes on a Colloquy with Edward Albee, Artslynx

Performance by Edward Albee, Long House Theatre

Cherry Lane Theatre website

"The Friars Club"

Who's afraid of Edward Albee, Laura Parker, Intelligent Life, 2009[show]

v • d • e

Pulitzer Prize for Drama
[show]

v • d • e

Pulitzer Prize for Drama
[show]

v • d • e

Edward Albee plays
[show]

v • d • e

1996 Kennedy Center Honorees
Categories: 1928 births | Living people | Actors Studio alumni | Adoptees | American dramatists and playwrights | 20th-century American Episcopalians | 21st-century American Episcopalians | American theatre directors | Gay writers | Grammy Award winners | Kennedy Center honorees | LGBT writers from the United States | Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters | Writers from New York | People from Washington, D.C. | Pulitzer Prize for Drama winners | Rye Country Day School people | Theatre of the Absurd | Tony Award winners | United States National Medal of Arts recipients | University ofThe Critical Response to Eudora Welty's Fiction, edited by Laurie Champion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994. xvi 368 pages. $55.