Eudora Welty

1909 - 2001

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty, Eudora Welty grew up in a close-knit and loving family. From her father she inherited a "love for all instruments that instruct and fascinate," from her mother a passion for reading and for language. With her brothers Edward Jefferson Welty and Walter Andrews Welty, she shared bonds of devotion, camaraderie, and humor. Nourished by such a background, Welty became perhaps the most distinguished graduate of the Jackson Public School System. She attended Davis Elementary School when Miss Lorena Duling was principal and graduated from Jackson's Central High School in 1925. Her collegiate years were spent first at the Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus and then at the University of Wisconsin where she received her bachelor's degree. From Wisconsin, Welty went on to graduate study at the Columbia University School of Business.

After her college years, Welty worked at WJDX radio station, wrote newspaper stories for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and served as a Junior Publicity Agent for the Works Progress Administration. She published her first story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," in 1936 – the editor of Manuscript literary magazine called it "one of the best stories we have ever read." Between 1936 and 1941, Welty published many a story, and in 1941 those stories were collected in a book called A Curtain of Green. She would go on to publish The Robber Bridegroom, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, The Bride of the Innisfallen, and Losing Battles. In 1973 Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist's Daughter. Welty's autobiography One Writer's Beginnings was published in 1984 by Harvard University Press and was a nationwide best seller. Her numerous honors included membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She has received the national Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, and the French Legion d'Honneur. All these honors eloquently testify to Eudora Welty's stature in American letters. As Reynolds Price in 1969 observed, no one in America "has yet shown stronger, richer, more useful fiction," and Price added that Welty's work called to mind the fiction of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov as her "peers for breadth and depth."

An accomplished photographer as well as writer, Welty first exhibited her photographs at New York City's Lugene Galleries in 1936. Her photograph book One Time, One Place was published in 1971, and more photographs have subsequently been published in books titled Photographs and Country Churchyards.

Eudora Welty was known and loved by a wide circle of friends and family who valued her intellect, her honesty, her imagination, her keen awareness of the world about her, her compassion, openness, and tolerance, her sense of humor, and her unfailing loyalty. She was preceded in death by her parents and her brothers. She is survived by her nieces Elizabeth Welty Thompson and Mary Alice Welty White, by her grand-nieces and nephews Leslie Thompson Jacobs, Zachary Welty Thompson, Donald Alexander White Jr., Andrews Welty White, and Elizabeth Eudora White, and by her sisters-in-law Mittie Creekmore Welty and Elinor Welty.

In 1957 Eudora Welty began to donate manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, published works, and secondary works about her fiction to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. She continued to do so throughout the remainder of her life, and in 1986 she gave her home as a life trust to the state of Mississippi. As a result of this gift, the Eudora Welty Foundation was established to preserve and maintain the Welty home and gardens and other archival memorabilia through joint administration with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The Eudora Welty Foundation and the Department of Archives and History envision the Welty home as an active literary experience that will enhance the understanding of Welty's fiction for visitors from across America and the world. The family requests that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Eudora Welty Foundation Inc., P.O. Box 55685, Jackson, MS 39296-5685, or to a favorite charity.

In The Optimist's Daughter, the character Laurel McKelva Hand realized that "her life, any life" is "nothing but the continuity of its love." Eudora Welty endures in the continuity of love her family and friends feel for her just as she endures in her work as writer and photographer and in the legacy of the home and papers that she has left to the state of Mississippi.

Visitation is scheduled for Wednesday, July 25, 2001, 2-5 p.m., at Old Capitol Museum. Further visitation is scheduled for Thursday, July 26, 1-2:30 p.m., at Galloway United Methodist Church. Services are scheduled for Thursday, 2:30 p.m., at the church. Burial will follow at Greenwood Cemetery. Arrangements entrusted to Wright & Ferguson Funeral Home, Jackson, Mississippi. Pallbearers will be Welty's five great nieces and nephews and Hunter Cole, John Evans, and Richard Ford.

Honorary Pallbearers will be Welty's faithful caregivers, Daryl L. Howard, Linda J. Cheaton, Lottie Anderson, Nora J. Kern, and devoted housekeeper, Eddie Polk.