A collection of short stories from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of classic American southern literature. Combining stories set in the rural south, Eudora Welty’s own special province, and stories with a European locale, which give a wider range to her fiction, The Bride of Innisfallen demonstrates the remarkable talent of one of the finest short story writers of our time. The gentle wit of the title story, the grave and musical prose of “Circe,” a retelling of Greek myth, the acute character portrayal and extraordinary evocation of the steamy bayou county in “No Place for You, My Love” are all touched with the particular magic that has made Welty one of America’s most beloved storytellers. “The writing throughout is at Ms. Welty’s best level.” —Edward Weeks, The Atlantic

In One Writer's Imagination, Suzanne Marrs draws upon nearly twenty years of conversations, interviews, and friendship with Eudora Welty to discuss the intersections between biography and art in the Pulitzer Prize winner's work. Through an engaging chronological and comprehensive reading of the Welty canon, Marrs describes the ways Welty's creative process transformed and transfigured fact to serve the purposes of fiction. She points to the sparks that lit Welty's imagination -- an imagination that thrived on polarities in her personal life and in society at large. Marrs offers new evidence of the role Welty's mother, circle of friends, and community played in her development as a writer and analyzes the manner in which her most heartfelt relationships -- including her romance with John Robinson -- inform her work. She charts the profound and often subtle ways Welty's fiction responded to the crucial historical episodes of her time -- notably the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement -- and the writer's personal reactions to war, racism, poverty, and the political issues of her day. In doing so, Marrs proves Welty to be a much more political artist than has been conventionally thought. Scrutinizing drafts of Welty's work, Marrs reveals an evolving pattern of revision increasingly significant to the author's thematic concerns and precision of style. Welty's achievement, Marrs explains, confirms theories of creativity even as it transcends them, remaining in its origins somewhat mysterious. Marrs's relationship to Eudora Welty as a friend, scholar, and archivist -- with access to private papers and restricted correspondence -- makes her a unique authority on Welty's forty-year career. The eclectic approach of her study speaks to the exhilarating power of imagination Welty so thoroughly enjoyed in the act of writing.

Kreyling instead reveals the dynamic growth in the depth and complexity of Welty's vision and literary technique over the course of her career."--BOOK JACKET.

Though this is a book of stories by Southerners, the settings range widely, from Italy to Ireland, from Montreal to Barbados. Included are works from such diverse Southern writers as Andre Dubus, William Goyen, Mary Hood, Tom T. Hall, Lewis Nordan and Jayne Anne Phillips.

Eudora Welty and Surrealism surveys Welty's fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. The study shows how the 1930s witnessed surrealism's arrival in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City where the surrealists exhibited and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism's perspective in her writing. In fact, Welty's first solo exhibition of her photographs in 1936 took place next door to New York's premier venue for surrealist art. In a series of readings that collectively examine A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, the book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty's striking figurative literature. Yet the influence of the surrealist movement extends beyond questions of style. The study's interpretations also foreground how her writing refracted surrealism as a historical phenomena. Scattered throughout her stories are allusions to personalities allied with the movement in the United States, including figures such as Salvador Dal', Elsa Schiaparelli, Caresse Crosby, Wallace Simpson, Cecil Beaton, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Henri Ford. Individuals such as these and others whom surrealism seduced often lead unorthodox and controversial lives that made them natural targets for moral opprobrium. Eschewing such parochialism, Welty borrowed the idiom of surrealism to develop modernized depictions of the South, a literary strategy that revealed not only cultural farsightedness but great artistic daring.

Drawing on their correspondence over some 30 years, Kreyling (English, Vanderbilt U.) traces the deeply affectionate symbiotic relationship between the great writer and her literary agent. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR