One Writer's Beginnings

Eudora Welty

Nov 2020 · Simon and Schuster

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The classic New York Times bestseller: “Beguiling as autobiography and . . . profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write serious fiction.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

An updated edition with a new introduction by Natasha Trethewey

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details in this memoir of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping of her personality and her writing. Everyday 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 became 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.

In her vivid descriptions of growing up in the South—of the interplay between black and white, town and countryside, dedicated schoolteachers and the children they taught—she recreates the vanished world of her youth with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction, capturing “the mysterious transfiguring gift by which dream, memory, and experience become art” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

This unique distillation of a writer’s beginnings offers a rare glimpse into the childhood that made Eudora Welty the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning writer she would become.

“It is all wonderful . . . The parts of the book that are about her family . . . are by turns hilarious and affecting.” —The New Yorker

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Eudora Welty (1909­–2001), one of the most important and beloved writers of the 20th century and master of the short story form, was born and lived most of her life in Jackson, Mississippi. The author of multiple essays, novellas, and novels, including The Optimist’s Daughter and Delta Wedding. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Order of the South, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, among many other literary awards. She was also the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.