The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Hardcover

Welty, Eudora

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151189943 ISBN 13: 9780151189946

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1980

Synopsis

This complete collection includes all the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are forty-one stories in all, including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories. With a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

One of the truly great works of twentieth-century American literature, Eudora Welty's Collected Stories confirms her place as a contemporary master of short fiction. Welty wrote novels, novellas, and reviews over the course of her long career, but the heart and soul of her literary vision lay with the short story. The forty-one pieces reproduced here, written over a period of three decades, include "A Petrified Man," "Why I Live at the P.O.,""The Wide Net," and "The Bride of Innisfallen." "I have been told," Welty writes in the introduction, "both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters." The characters that spring to life in this masterwork reveal the depth and breadth of her love.
"Miss Welty's short stories are deceptively simple. They are concerned with ordinary people, but what happens to them and the manner of the telling are far from ordinary . . . A fine writer and a distinguished book. "--The New Yorker
"Eudora Welty is one of our purest, finest, gentlest voices and this collection is something to be treasured."--Anne Tyler
"The ironic tenderness of Chekhov, the almost feral edge of Maupassant, the ominousness of Poe and Bierce, the lacy strength of Henry Green. She is probably the finest Mozartian stylist writing in then English language."--Mary Lee Settle
"Stories as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's . . . The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types-farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery-but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision."--Reynolds Price

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She worked as a photographer during the Depression and published her first book, a collection of short stories, in 1941. In addition to short fiction, Welty wrote novels, novellas, essays, and reviews, and was the winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. By the time of her death in 2001, Welty had established herself as one of the most important and beloved American writers of the twentieth century.

About the Author:

Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia Business School. While at Columbia University, where she was the captain of the women's polo team, Welty was a regular at Romany Marie's café in 1930.[1] During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs. The headstone of Eudora Welty at Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi.Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her 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 legendary and oft-anthologized stories "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man," and "A Worn Path." Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story, and was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, where, despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of her hometown. Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0151189943
• ISBN 13: 9780151189946
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 640