EUDORA WELTY
April 13, 1909 - July 23, 2001
 

"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out (at a young age) that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass."

~ Her father, Christian Webb Welty, was director of an insurance company. Her mother, Chestina Andrews, was a homemaker and an avid gardener.

~ Around the age of seven, Eudora was diagnosed with a fast-beating heart and confined to bed for several months.

~ There, she discovered books: myths, nursery rhymes, encyclopedias and popular fiction.

~ Eudora went to Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, Mississippi.

~ Later, she transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where she became an English major.

~ After she received her degree, she attended Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York and studied advertising.

~ Eudora became seriously interested in photography. She used a Kodak camera with bellows and developed her own prints.

~ During the Depression, Eudora returned to Jackson. In that same year, her father became critically ill with leukemia and died while receiving a blood transfusion from her mother.

~ Later, she got a full-time job with the Works Progress Administration as a Junior Publicity Agent.

~ In June of 1936, Eudora's writing career emerged with her first published short story "Death of a Traveling Salesman" which appeared in a small magazine called Manuscript.

~ Eudora was so depressed when editors of the Southern Review returned her short story "Petrified Man," she destroyed the only copy.

~ When the editors later had second thoughts, she rewrote the entire story from memory.

~ It was included in the 0. Henry Prize Stories of 1939.

~ Eudora's first novel, Delta Wedding, was published in 1946.

~ Just as her writings were receiving national attention, her family was falling apart.

~ Both of her brothers were diagnosed with severe arthritis while her mother was paralyzed by a stroke.

~ Eudora spent the next fifteen years caring for her helpless family.

~ In 1973, her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize.

~ Eudora never married. She lived alone in the Jackson house her father built until she died of pneumonia at the age of 92.