A centennial consideration of the great author's vision as expressed in her renowned photography

Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness. Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.

Eudora Welty and Surrealism surveys Welty's fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. The study shows how the 1930s witnessed surrealism's arrival in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City where the surrealists exhibited and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism's perspective in her writing. In fact, Welty's first solo exhibition of her photographs in 1936 took place next door to New York's premier venue for surrealist art. In a series of readings that collectively examine A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, the book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty's striking figurative literature. Yet the influence of the surrealist movement extends beyond questions of style. The study's interpretations also foreground how her writing refracted surrealism as a historical phenomena. Scattered throughout her stories are allusions to personalities allied with the movement in the United States, including figures such as Salvador Dal', Elsa Schiaparelli, Caresse Crosby, Wallace Simpson, Cecil Beaton, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Henri Ford. Individuals such as these and others whom surrealism seduced often lead unorthodox and controversial lives that made them natural targets for moral opprobrium. Eschewing such parochialism, Welty borrowed the idiom of surrealism to develop modernized depictions of the South, a literary strategy that revealed not only cultural farsightedness but great artistic daring.

WINNER OF THE 2022 EUDORA WELTY PRIZE Internationally known as a writer, Eudora Welty has as well been spotlighted as a talented photographer. The prevalent idea remains that Welty simply took snapshots before she found her true calling as a renowned fiction writer. But who was Welty as a photographer? What did she see? How and why did she photograph? And what did Welty know about modern photography? In Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty's Photographic Reflections, Annette Trefzer elucidates Welty’s photographic vision and answers these questions by exploring her photographic archive and writings on photography. The photographs Welty took in the 1930s and ’40s frame her visual response to the cultural landscapes of the segregated South during the Depression. The photobook One Time, One Place, which was selected, curated, and shaped into a visual narrative by Welty herself, serves as a starting point and guide for the chapters on her spatial hermeneutic. The book is divided into sections by locations and offers how the framing of these areas reveals Welty’s radical commentary of the spaces her camera captured. There are over eighty images in Exposing Mississippi, including some never-before-seen archival photographs, and sections of the book draw on over three hundred more. The chapters on institutional, leisure, and memorial landscapes address how Welty’s photographs contribute to, reflect on, and intervene in customary visual constructions of the Depression-era South.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Susan V. Donaldson, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Jean C. Griffith, Ebony Lumumba, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Adrienne Akins Warfield The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty’s fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. The thirteen diverse voices in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s uses of African American signifying in her short stories and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. Contributors discuss her adaptations of gothic plots, haunted houses, Civil War stories, and film noir. And they frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in America, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to other works by such contemporary writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Discussions of race and class here also bring her masterwork The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, underrepresented in earlier conversations, into new focus. Moreover, as a group these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres.

Eudora Welty: Thirteen Essays edited by Peggy W. Prenshaw This collection of essays about the writings of Eudora Welty, a southern writer in the grand tradition of American literature, reflects the range of Welty criticism. Themes, forms, and stylistic features in her work are given careful consideration by some of the most notable of Welty scholars: Chester E. Eisinger, John A. Allen, J. A. Bryant, Jr., John Edward Hardy, Albert J. Devlin, Warren French, Julia L. Demmin and Daniel Curley, Daniele Pitavy-Souques, Robert B. Heilman, Seymour L. Gross, Barbara McKenzie, Michael Kreyling, and Ruth M. Vande Kieft. The essays included in this volume were selected from the 1979 publication Eudora Welty: Critical Essays also edited by Peggy W. Prenshaw. Eudora Welty: Thirteen Essays retains the breadth of subject and approach that marked the earlier volume. Dr. Peggy W. Prenshaw is currently the Millsaps College Humanities Scholar in Residence. She recently retired from the Fred C. Frey Chair in Southern Studies at Louisiana State University. She has published widely on southern women writers, including Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Spencer.

In this definitive account of the life of one of the finest writers of the 20th century, Marrs restores Eudora Welty's story to human proportions, tracing Welty's history from her roots in Jackson, Mississippi, to her rise to international stature.

A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty’s Nonfiction and Photographs is the first book-length study of Eudora Welty’s full range of achievements in nonfiction and photography. A preeminent Welty scholar, Pearl Amelia McHaney offers clear-eyed and complex assessments of Welty’s journalism, book reviews, letters, essays, autobiography, and photographs. Each chapter focuses on one genre, filling in gaps left by previous books. With keen skills of observation, finely tuned senses, intellect, wit, awareness of audience, and modesty, Welty applied her genius in all that she did, holding a tough line on truth, breaking through “the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s plight.” McHaney’s study brings critical attention to the under-evaluated genres of Welty’s work and discusses the purposeful use of arguments, examples, and styles, demonstrating that Welty pursued her craft to a high standard across genres with a greater awareness of context than she admitted in her numerous interviews. Welty consistently dared new styles, new audiences, and new publishing venues in order to express her ideas to their fullest. It is “serious daring,” as she wrote in One Writer’s Beginnings, that makes for great writing. In “Place in Fiction,” Welty asks, “How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk—experiment—is a considerable part of the joy of doing.”

Eudora Welty is a beloved institution of Southern fiction and American literature, whose closely guarded privacy has prevented a full-scale study of her life and work--until now. A significant contribution to the world of letters, Ann Waldron's biography chronicles the history and achievements of one of our greatest living authors, from a Mississippi childhood to the sale of her first short story, from her literary friendships with Katherine Anne Porter and Elizabeth Bowen to her rivalry with Carson McCullers. Elegant and authoritative, this first biography to chart the life of a national treasure is a must-have for Welty fans and scholars everywhere.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty's writing and photography were the subject of more than one thousand reviews, of which over two hundred are collected here. From the first, reviewers loved Welty's language and disparaged her lack of plot. Their eager anticipation for the next book is rarely diminished by the shock of reading entirely different styles of writing. Her work was admired even as it challenged its readers. The reviews selected for reprinting here represent the diversity of Welty's reception and assessment. Reviews from small towns, urban centers, noted fiction writers, professional reviewers, academics, and everyday readers are included. The comments of reviewing rivals such as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, Nation and New Yorker, when read side by side, reveal the nuances both of the reviewers and of the work of this important Southern writer.