A Study Guide for Eudora Welty's "The Optimist's Daughter," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

This Pulitzer Prize–winning novel tells the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Along in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

This novel of a Mississippi family in the 1920s “presents the essence of the Deep South and does it with infinite finesse” (The Christian Science Monitor). From one of the most treasured American writers, winner of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, comes Delta Wedding, a vivid and charming portrait of Southern life. Set in 1923, the story is centered on the Fairchilds, a big and clamorous family, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. They are in the midst of planning their daughter’s wedding when a nine-year-old relative, Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, comes to visit. Drama leads to drama, revelation to revelation, in a novel that is “nothing short of wonderful” (The New Yorker). The result is a sometimes-riotous view of a Southern family, and the parentless child who learns to become one of them.

Featuring a new introduction, this updated edition of the New York Times bestselling classic by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author and one of the most revered figures in American letters is “profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write” (Los Angeles Times). Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. 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, between town and countryside, between 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). Part memoir, part exploration of the seeds of creativity, this unique distillation of a writer’s beginnings offers a rare glimpse into the Mississippi childhood that made Eudora Welty the acclaimed and important writer she would become.

Collects photographs of Mississippians that Welty took in the 1930s when she worked for the Works Progress Administration.

A Study Guide for Eudora Welty's "The Ponder Heart," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.