Stories as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. These stories are honest, and vastly entertaining.

Together in one volume are 250 representative photographs from the collection of a few thousand which Eudora Welty took during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. It is a dazzling record of Welty's unique and special vision.

This collection of complementary and interrelated essays by ten well-known Welty critics brings welcome clarification to the controversial subject of Eudora Welty and the political, a topic once presumed to be closed tight. As the essays prove, Welty has been inaccurately assessed by critics from Diana Trilling in the Nation (1943) to Claudia Roth Pierpont in the New Yorker (1998) as a writer who avoids political, historical, or cultural engagement in her fiction. The better question these essayists explore is not whether but how Welty’s work is to be understood as political. Harriet Pollack, Suzanne Marrs, Peggy Prenshaw, Noel Polk, Suzan Harrison, Ann Romines, Rebecca Mark, Barbara Ladd, Sharon Baris, and Danièle Pitavy-Souques place Welty’s seeming rejection of the political in her 1961 essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?” into the cultural and historical context of 1940–1960, when “individualism” was a code word for political and personal freedom and was defined in contrast to totalitarianism as represented by Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Welty, they show, though she repudiated the concept of fiction as editorial, wrote stories that were inherently and unavoidably political. The essayists look closely at how surprisingly often Welty’s fiction, criticism, and photographs are oblique responses to public political issues—political corruption, racial apartheid, poverty, McCarthyism and the Rosenberg trials, violent resistance to the civil rights movement, integration of schools, and filial piety and southern reverence for identities of the cultural past. The deceptive opposition of the terms private and political may be most at fault for misreading Welty. As the only living author to be reedited by the Library of America, Eudora Welty deserves a sound appreciation of her complex oeuvre. Eudora Welty and Politics provides just that, approaching Welty’s work from an all-new point of view to reveal how the writer repeatedly registered a political vision in her work.

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

Three generations of Granny Vaughn's descendants gather at her Mississippi home to celebrate her 90th birthday. Possessed of the true storyteller's gift, the members of this clan cannot resist the temptation to swap tales.

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.

Mississippi author Eudora Welty, the first living writer to be published in the Library of America series, mentored many of today's greatest fiction writers and is a fascinating woman, having lived the majority of the twentieth century (1909-2001). Her life reflects a century of change and is closely entwined with many events that mark our recent history. This biography follows this twentieth-century path while telling Welty's story, beginning with her parents and their important influence on her reading and writing life. The chapters that follow focus on her education and her most important teachers; her life during the Depression and how her career, just getting started, is interrupted by World War II; and how she shows independence and courage through her writing during the turbulent civil rights period of the 1950s and 1960s. After years of care giving and the deaths of all her immediate family members, Welty persevered and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter. Her popularity soared in the 1980s after she delivered the three William E. Massey Lectures to standing-room-only crowds at Harvard, and the lectures were later published as One Writer's Beginnings and became a New York Times bestseller. This biography intends to introduce readers to one of the most significant women writers of the past century, a prolific author who transcends her Mississippi roots and has written short stories, novels, and non-fiction that will endure for all time.