Eudora: A Writer's Life

Your private life should be kept private," said Eudora Welty in response to a question about the relevance of biography. "My own I don't think would particularly interest anybody, for that matter. But I'd guard it; I feel strongly about that. They'd have a hard time trying to find out something about me." This first biography of Eudora Welty makes a significant contribution to the world of letters as a chronicle of the life and achievements of one of our greatest living authors, a woman of paramount importance in the American literary canon. From a Mississippi childhood to a brief editorial career in New York, from the sale of her first short story to her beloved and bestselling memoir-- One Writer's Beginnings, which she wrote at age seventy-five--this biography charts the details and moments that contributed to the development of Welty's unique vision and unforgettable voice. Here, too, are her literary influences, including her correspondence and meeting with the great man Faulkner, the invaluable friendships with Katherine Anne Porter and Elizabeth Bowen, the rivalry with Carson McCullers, and the small circle of lifelong confidants to whom Eudora entrusted her work: agent Diarmuid Russell, editor Mary Lou Aswell, and Robert Penn Warren. Ann Waldron brings together the details and moments of Welty's life, and shows how this writer's sensibility is formed and informed above all by a sense of place and purpose. Elegant and evenhanded, respectful and authoritative, the first biography to chart the life of this national treasure is required reading for Welty fans everywhere. Review "They'd have a hard time trying to find out something about me," Eudora Welty once told an interviewer to explain her fierce aversion to biography. Ann Waldron, who has written well-received biographies of Southern novelist Caroline Gordon and editor Hodding Carter, discovered just how hard a time when she set out to write the first, and of course unauthorized, biography of this "sanctified, canonized, apotheosized" literary figure. But Waldron persisted to brilliant results: Eudora: A Writer's Life is not only a fully detailed portrait but a fair and balanced one. "Ugly to the point of being grotesque," as a fellow Mississippian said of her, Welty, who was born in Jackson in 1909, always made her way by charm, wit, and an offbeat sense of humor. Though Waldron admits that few of Welty's friends would talk to her, she nonetheless tracked down amazing amounts of new material on her personal life--her tense, guilt-ridden relationship with her widowed mother; her sustaining friendships with such literary figures as Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, and Reynolds Price; and her possible romance with the mysterious John Robinson, who, like many of the men in Welty's life, turned out to be gay. Waldron does a creditable, if at times perfunctory, job of following the trajectory of Welty's literary career--from her first hauntingly strange short stories collected in A Curtain of Green to whimsical productions of her midcareer like The Ponder Heart to her "warm, appealing, beautifully written" memoir, One Writer's Beginnings. Literary analysis is scant here, but that's fine, because many others have written at length and in depth about Welty's work. But only Ann Waldron has dared to do the life--and she has succeeded in making it clear, sympathetic, respectful, and wonderfully readable. --David Laskin Ann Waldron is the author of two critically acclaimed Southern biographies, Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance and Hodding Carter. She has been a reporter and columnist for the Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times, and Atlanta Constitution, as well as book editor at the Houston Chronicle. She is also the author of seven books for children.