Eudora Welty: A Biography by Suzanne Marrs

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Eudora Welty (1909-2001) might be the most honored writer in American literary history, but her life remains mostly unknown. Such anonymity seems to have been the Mississippi author's wish; even her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, which became a national bestseller, seems more like a preemptive strike than a full confession. In the last years of her life, however, Welty's reserve was breached by critic Suzanne Marrs, who became her friend and confidante. This authoritative and gracefully biography is the fruit of the friendship.

From the Publisher

Eudora Welty’s works are treasures of American litera­ture. When her first short-story collection was published in 1941, it heralded the arrival of a genuinely original writer who over the decades wrote hugely popular novels, novellas, essays, and a memoir. By the time she died in 2001, Welty had been given numerous literary awards and was all but shrouded in admiration. 

In this definitive account, Suzanne Marrs restores Welty’s story to human proportions, tracing Welty’s life from her roots in Jackson, Mississippi, to her rise to international stature. Making generous use of Welty’s correspondence, particularly with contemporaries and admirers including Katherine Anne Porter and E. M. Forster, Marrs has crafted a fitting and fascinating tribute to one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.

The New York Times - Francine Prose

— Eudora Welty belongs on the shelf beside its subject's own work. Neither hagiography nor pathography, it is, you feel, the thoroughly respectful and straightforward biography its honest, modest, intensely private subject would have wanted.

Publishers Weekly

I was seduced by Eudora Welty. I had every reason to distrust her, as I had distrusted Faulkner-both of them products of the middle-class South I disdained in preference for what I called the real South-the queer and working-class writers I took as my own models. Part of my distrust came from all those photographs-those neat, well-put-together, backcover shots. You need a good biography to counter the myths perpetrated by those photos, a good biography that sends you back to the actual work, the novels and short stories and essays. Suzanne Marrs has written that biography of Eudora Welty-a book that debunks the myths and quotes enough of the writing to make you hunger for the novels and stories. Marrs takes pains to refute the image of Eudora as a perfect "Southern Lady," a "nearly petrified woman holding to the mores of the Southern past"-myths strengthened and reinforced by Ann Waldron's 1998 biography and the lengthy New Yorker article by Claudia Roth Pierpont. That Welty knew how she was imagined, and that she had the grace-a deep, resonant well of humor, insight and talent-is made plain. Here we have the necessary counterpoint: not Eudora the pitiful old maid nor Eudora the homely, the victim of her domineering mother, but the real deal: Eudora the writer who loved fiercely but never married, falling in love first with a man who, though he loved her, would always love men more, and then with a man who was not only married and faithful to his wife, but doomed by Alzheimer's and early death to recede from the genuine affection he felt for her. The story of Eudora Welty's long relationship with Kenneth Millar, who wrote detective fiction under the pen name Ross Macdonald, has the weight of genuine tragedy. Both of them believed in the magic of fate, their meeting at the Algonquin Hotel in 1971 and the years of twice-monthly correspondence that followed. One of the revelations of the biography is that Ken Millar and Eudora were in each other's company only about six weeks in total. Though Eudora tried, she was never able to complete any of the stories she began on the subject. For all the emphasis on Eudora's loneliness, her everyday life contained a rich and sustained circle of friends who were some of the great writers and public figures of the 20th century. Yes, she had her mother and cared for her deeply, but she had also friends who valued what she did and sustained her and it. Think of Katharine Anne Porter , Elizabeth Bowen, Reynolds Price, Robert Penn Warren, Stephen Spender and Anne Tyler. "You love Eudora as a friend," Ken Millar once said to Reynolds Price. "I love her as a woman." The rest of us get to love her as a writer, and with this biography-the whole of her extraordinary world. Dorothy Allison is the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller and the forthcoming She Who (Riverhead). Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Marrs (English, Millsaps Coll.; One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty) successfully delivers a multifaceted (and authorized) biography of Mississippi-born Eudora Welty (1909-2001), celebrated short story writer, poet, essayist, novelist, and reviewer. Marrs, who met and befriended Welty while teaching at Millsaps, had a heartfelt desire to represent her as the warm and human woman that she was rather than the public idol many thought her to be. Using Welty's correspondences with contemporaries like Katherine Anne Porter, E.M. Forster, and Elizabeth Bowen; interviews with Welty and her friends and family; personal photos; and manuscripts, Marrs constructs a detailed representation of the author. Born to loving parents, never married, and a fierce protector of her privacy, Welty was thought by many to have led a sheltered life. To the contrary, her 30 years of award-winning fiction revealed the ability to flesh out a wide variety of protagonists, from slaves to tenant farmers, from small-minded socialites to society's undesirables. Other biographies include Ann Waldron's unauthorized Eudora: A Writer's Life as well as Welty's own memoir, One Writer's Beginnings. Recommended for academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/05.]-Kim Harris, Rochester P.L., NY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A friend and noted scholar of the graciously skilled Southern author fashions a beaming, hefty salute to her long, fruitful life. Marrs (English/Millsaps Coll.) takes issue with Ann Waldron's unauthorized biography (Eudora, 1998), which depicted the author as a "charming and successful ugly duckling," and with Claudia Roth Pierpont's equally reductive New Yorker portrait of "a perfect lady-a nearly Petrified Woman." This weightily detailed volume emphasizes Welty's restless vitality and openness to new experience. The author does not deal in psychoanalytical fine points. In her account, Welty (1909-2001) had a happy childhood in Jackson, Miss., sheltered by adoring parents with whom she would live well into her adult years, but broadened by travel, especially to New York City. Moving from photography, her first love, to fiction, Welty encountered success fairly early and by 1936 saw the publication of her first story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," along with an exhibition of her photographs at a New York gallery. She gradually built up a repertory of exquisitely crafted stories, published as A Curtain of Green in 1941, and garnered a close working relationship with the literary names that would mentor and sponsor her, such as Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, William Maxwell and loyal agent Diarmuid Russell. Welty overcame the crushing disappointment of never marrying her hometown beau, John Robinson, whose inferior literary talent and conflicted sexuality drove him from her by middle age. Gracious to younger talent, she was instrumental in promoting the work of others, such as Reynolds Price. Marrs tenderly asserts that Welty enjoyed an independent life characterized by "thepresence of melancholy intertwined with joy." However, her reluctance to make autobiographical suppositions about her subject's work leaves this volume faintly dry and ethereal. Readable, if incomplete, account of a national treasure.

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Shelter and Beyond

1909-1931

On April 13, 1909, Eudora Alice Welty was born to Christian Webb and Chestina Andrews Welty. The young couple had been living in Jackson, Mississippi, since their marriage five years earlier. He had come from Ohio, she from West Virginia; they had met when Chris, as he was known, worked one summer at a logging camp near her home. Courtship had led to love, and they had chosen to begin their married life in Mississippi's rapidly growing capital city; Jackson's population had been slightly less than eight thousand in 1900, but by 1910 it would have more than tripled. In this booming town, the Weltys prospered: In 1906 Chris joined the newly established Lamar Life Insurance Company as its cashier, becoming the assistant secretary by year's end, and in 1908 the couple built their first house, on North Congress Street. Though Chestina, or Chessie as her husband called her, kept a cow and chickens in the backyard, the Weltys lived within six blocks of Chris's office and of the downtown theaters, department stores, and grocers; within two blocks of the state capitol; and within three blocks of Galloway Methodist Church, to which they belonged. They also lived across the street from a grammar school and within sight of a cemetery. Their first child, a son born in 1906, lay in that cemetery, having died at the age of fifteen months. This loss had been devastating, but now the birth of a daughter was cause for both great rejoicing and great resolve. Chris and Chessie would be protective parents indeed.


An ardent amateur photographer as well as an excited new father, Chris constantly snapped pictures of his daughter-as a babe in hermother's arms; in a specially ordered bonnet; on her first Christmas; on a trip to West Virginia and Ohio the summer after her birth; at home, attempting her first steps; with a miniature baby carriage and doll; in the yard with her mother's chickens; in a fine dress for her three-year-old birthday party. Chestina gathered these pictures and many others into an album and wrote captions for the photos; below a picture of Chris and Eudora she wrote "a proud Daddy," and below one of herself with the baby, she added "and mother too." From the first, Eudora Welty was reared in an atmosphere of abundant parental love.1


She was also reared in a book-filled environment. By the time she was two or three years old, Eudora knew, as she wrote in her autobiography, that "any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to me. She'd read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story. She'd read to me in the diningroom on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with 'Cuckoo,' and at night when I'd got in my own bed. I must have given her no peace. Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story."2 From the start, Eudora loved the written word, and her keen ear for language and inflection began to develop long before she could read for herself. After she became a reader on her own, Eudora followed a pattern set by her mother and would often have several books underway, one for each of the various rooms in her house.


Having spent three years as an only child, Eudora might have felt displaced when her brothers, Edward Jefferson Welty and Walter Andrews Welty, were born in 1912 and 1915. But though Chris took a photo of Eudora pouting behind Chessie and the newly arrived Edward, Chessie's photo caption noted that her daughter was "not as sorry as she looks." Indeed, she was not. She and Edward proved kindred spirts from the start: "I can't think I had much of a sense of humor as long as I remained the only child. When my brother Edward came along after I was three, we both became comics, making each other laugh. We set each other off, as we did for life, from the minute he learned to talk. A sense of the absurd was communicated between us probably before that." Though Walter even as an infant proved more serious than his older siblings, his sister doted on him and sought to entertain him: Once, she reported, "I snatched up his baby bathtub and got behind it and danced for him, to hear him really crow. On the pink bottom of his tub I'd drawn a face with crayons, and all he could see of anybody's being there was my legs prancing under it." And of course Eudora's parents were proud of the new additions to their family. When the city of Jackson held a baby parade in 1916, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that Christian Welty participated with three-and-a-half-year-old Edward, who was on a velocipede-or tricycle, as we know it today-and that Chestina Welty strolled with six-month-old Walter in his baby carriage decorated with roses.3


The closeness of family life was something Eudora treasured. In One Writer's Beginnings, she recalled hearing her parents perform their own version of Franz Lehar's "The Merry Widow Waltz" as she buttoned her shoes in the morning: "They would begin whistling back and forth to each other up and down the stairwell. My father would whistle his phrase, my mother would try to whistle, then hum hers back. It was their duet. I drew my buttonhook in and out and listened to it-I knew it was 'The Merry Widow.' The difference was, their song almost floated with laughter: how different from the record, which growled from the beginning, as if the Victrola were only slowly being wound up." And she loved to lie in bed listening to her parents across the room talk or read to each other: "I don't remember that any secrets were revealed to me, nor do I remember any avid curiosity on my part to learn something I wasn't supposed to-perhaps I was too young to know what to listen for. But I was present in the room with the chief secret there was-the two of them, father and mother, sitting there as one."4 The strength of her parents' union betokened a larger union of parents and children. Family activities for the Weltys were constant. They went for early-morning swims, they attended lectures, concerts, and plays brought by the Circuit Chautauqua to Poindexter Park, they looked at the stars through Chris's telescope, they flew homemade kites in pastures outside of town, they consulted the dictionary to determine the meaning of words that had baffled one of them during dinner conversation, and they journeyed to Ohio and West Virginia to visit grandparents, uncles, and cousins. Each summer mother and children also journeyed about fifteen miles from Jackson and spent several weeks trying to escape the city heat. Their destination was a small resort called Hubbard's Wells, a place where healthful waters could be drunk, where paper lanterns hung from the trees, and where local pianist Eddie Stiles provided live entertainment some evenings. Chris joined his family on weekends.


Back home in Jackson, the Welty children were part of a lively neighborhood. They joined other children in riding velocipedes, and eventually, bicycles (Eudora was proud to own a "Princess" bicycle). With friends they played hopscotch and jacks, jumped rope, and roller-skated. At twilight they pulled their "choo-choo boats" made from shoe boxes, with holes cut out in the shape of the moon and stars and with lighted candles inside. And they shared rides in pony carts.


Eudora and her friends loved strolling to the movies.

Setting out in the early summer afternoon on foot, by way of Smith Park to Capitol Street and down it, passing the Pythian Castle with its hot stone breath, through the one spot of shade beneath Mrs. Black's awning, crossing Town Creek-then visible and uncontained-we went carrying parasols over our heads and little crocheted bags over our wrists containing the ten or fifteen cents for the

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