Among the most beloved of American writers, Eudora Welty's stories and novels have entertained us for over half a century. Here, in her memoirs, she writes with her usual candor and grace about how a writer's sensibilities are shaped. As compelling as her stories, as witty as her personality, as finely honed as her fiction, Welty's account of her life is a powerful and fulfilling read.


New Yorker
It is all wonderful...The parts of the book that are about her family...are by turns hilarious and affecting. They are a kind of present...from Miss Welty to her audience.


From Book News, Inc.
<:;st> A reprint of the Harvard University Press edition (1984), a William E. Massey, Sr. lecture in the history of American civilization (1983); and recommended by BCL3. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.


From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith
Eudora Welty's many awards for her writings include the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Optimist's Daughter In One Writer's Beginning she explores her path of becoming a writer. In her 70s when she wrote this memoir, she looks back fondly on a happy childhood with her family. Her father, a man who looks to the future, instills in his children a broad view of life; her mother makes every room a reading room at any time of day. Family trips to visit out-of-state relatives are journeys with "direction, movement, development, change" that plant the seeds for her first novel, and from these seeds her words grow, watered and tended by imagination and curiosity. Eudora Welty knows, loves, and appreciates her family for the firm foundation they have provided, a foundation she has built on throughout her life. As her mother, "lying helpless and nearly blind, in her bed, an old lady," recites poetry, the author is aware: "She was teaching me one more, almost her last, lesson: emotions do not grow old. I knew that I would feel as she did, and I do." Filled with tenderness and honesty, this is but one of the many reflections that comes through, a reminder to us not to dismiss the importance of our pasts or our emotions. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.

ANNOTATION

Forty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and nominee for the National Book Critics Award, this incomparable work--part memoir, part essay, and part autobiography--offers a revealing look into the life of one of America's most acclaimed writers. 8 pages of photographs.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.

Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.

FROM THE CRITICS

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