Eudora Welty: A Biography

There are terrific reviews already on this site, and I can add little to what has already been said. I've been a Welty fan since discovering her work 40 years ago, and have a reply from her from many, many years ago when I wrote her a rather gushing fan letter in grade school. I suppose that, like many Welty fans, I concentrated on her work. I'd read peripherally about her friendship with Porter and others, and I've enjoyed her photographic work. I'd also read One Writer's Beginnings. However, this work goes much deeper into Miss Welty's personal life than I'd been exposed to before. Who can say what's tragic or sad in another's life? We all create our existence to different muses. I was delighted to find this book, and appreciate Ms. Marrs's scholarship.

Solid research by a top Eudora Welty scholar is coupled here with close friendship in the last 15 years of Welty's long life. Suzanne Marrs friendship with Welty gave her unparalleled access to papers and a wide circle of Eudora Welty's friends. In addition to the text there is a delightful section of 16 pages of photos ranging from Welty's childhood through old age--including a few she took herself. Welty emerges from the pages of Marrs' biography as a woman engaged in the world--not sheltered from it as the popular myth of her life suggested. Even during the years of her so-called Writer's Block, she traveled widely and worked hard to craft and deliver speeches at colleges and universities that are later gathered into essays. I was particularly touched by the passages relating to her involvement in taking care of her mother in old age and of how she strove--ultimately not for publication--to transform her pain at Ken Millar's (aka Ross Macdonald) Alzheimer's. Although she grieved as close friends died, Eudora Welty also seems a wonderful model for vigorous aging as she kept active, involved, tried new things, and kept a cadre of acquaintances of all ages in her orbit. --Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909 and died July 23, 2001. She was a Southern woman and that simple fact was what initially brought her to my attention so many years ago. I so enjoy the Southern writer. And Eudora Welty is no exception. Welty is a critically acclaimed writer of essays, short stories and novels. Hers are the stories that I return to every so often, always finding something new in them. Welty's 1984 memoir One Writer's Beginning was her own personal life account. And while that was interesting it is this biography that seems to fill in the blanks with substance; probably because the author had a distance Welty didn't. What I found most interesting is the author's ability to humanize this icon of literature. Welty was first and foremost a woman who though she had an extreme talent, enjoyed humor, loved deeply (even though she never married), had numerous friends (many who were writers), loved her mother (whom people thought dominated Welty) and thought of New York as her second home. Welty was definitely not the "old maid" some thought she was. She fell in love with a man who cared for her but also was interested in men. She then lost in love with a married man who was stricken with Alzheimer's. But it was the long-term relationship with Kenneth Millar (detective fiction writer Ross Macdonald) that will make your heart skip a beat. They met at the Algonquin Hotel and corresponded with each other twice each month. They only spent a total of six weeks together over the years but they always believed that fate brought them together. I enjoyed the small items in this book: that Welty admired Langston Hughes's poetry and that osteoporosis took six inches from her five-foot-ten height. Especially touching are the memories of the relationship with Ken Millar. Marrs book is a complete, considerate and grand account of the life of an important American literary icon. It is a book that I will revisit just like her body of work. Armchair Interviews says her work, like her biography is something to be read, reread and savored.

There seems to be something provincial about any writer that lives in Mississippi. They cannot be viewed as normal people. When they are female, far from beautiful, remain unmarried, somewhat sequestered, a name like Eudora, and live with their mother, the image comes unbidden of a demure Southern Lady, incapable of expressing emotion, if they have any. Eudora Welty fit this image perfectly, and because she did it is too easy to dismiss her writing as worthless. Then you look at the prizes:Pulitzer, National Book, eight (yes 8) O. Henry's, National Medal of Literature, Medal of Freedom. There had to be something more behind the image, something of life to give the understanding for such insight. Ms. Marrs biography does an excellent job of giving life to Eudora Welty. That she considered New York her alternate home. That she was for integration in a segregationist South. That the loves in her life happened to be unavailable, but that they indeed were there. Ms. Marrs book provides a view of Eudora Welty that rounds out her life in a most plesant way.

More than 60 years since the publication of her first book, A CURTAIN OF GREEN, Eudora Welty's status as a major voice in American letters is unquestioned. One of the chief joys of her art is evinced in the ways her finely wrought short stories and elaborately patterned novels capture colorful characters whose depth and dignity are matched by a spirited, often unselfconscious zest for life and living. It is furthermore acknowledged that the range of men and women who people Welty's narratives offers consistent proof that "regional literature" is as varied as it is universal, that even the most geographically cloistered characters (think "Livvie" in the story of that name) are capable of feeling and sensing the same sort of complexities of the most sophisticated, urban-dwelling aristocrats who people Henry James's fiction. With respect to the author, however, most scholars tend to dismiss Welty's emotional and active life as devoid of incident or color. In a widely read "Introduction" to the author in THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, VOLUME 2, for example, the editors insist that her "outwardly uneventful life and her writing are most intimately connected to the topography and atmosphere of the season and the soil of the native Mississippi that ha[d] been her lifelong home." Such logic assumes Welty sacrificed the chance of a fulfilling personal life in the service of her art. Suzanne Marrs, the author of EUDORA WELTY: A Biography, insists that this is a reductive view that fails to consider the author's full engagement in matters of family, romantic love, travel, and politics over the course of nine decades. In a patient, well-documented, thoroughly considered overview of the writer's life, Marrs debunks the notion that Welty's existence was "uneventful"; and if, even after such a painstaking process, Welty's personal narrative seems tame in comparison to the high drama of her mentor, Katherine Anne Porter, or the intense personal trials of her contemporary, Richard Wright, Marrs's EUDORA WELTY amply documents the writer's full participation in almost every aspect of a long and fulfilling life. Organized into 11 chapters, EUDORA WELTY first traces the author's sheltered upbringing by two well-educated parents who migrated from the north shortly before her birth; it then delves into key moments of the author's self discovery. (Marrs's careful, patient analysis reveals that Welty's talents weren't simply literary; her lifelong passion for photography began as early as the 1930s.) Just as Welty's formative years as a young writer led to the publication of her first and perhaps most celebrated book, she was confronted by the atrocities of World War II --- an event that affected her on a political and personal level. It is in the ensuing decade that we witness a passionate, albeit frustrated, long-distance love affair between Welty and longtime friend John Robinson. Exactly why this relationship did not progress into a physical one lead