One Writer's Beginnings

Eudora Alice Welty was an American writer whose work is characterized by intimate expressions of Southern life. Welty’s works were the first by a living author to be preserved by the Library of America, and she was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi, into a comfortable, Methodist middle-class household. Her father worked in insurance and had a fascination with gadgets and mechanical devices; her mother was a schoolteacher and avid reader. From an early age, Eudora absorbed both a love of storytelling and a curiosity about the physical world—two instincts that would later converge in her photography and writing.

Welty attended Central High School in Jackson before studying at Mississippi State College for Women. She then transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where she completed a degree in English. After college, Welty spent a year studying advertising at Columbia University in New York, though she soon returned to Jackson following her father’s death in 1931. The early years of her adulthood, including her work with the Federal WPA as a publicity agent in Mississippi during the Great Depression, honed her observational skills. She collected photographs of rural life, later noting how these images shaped her sense of place and character in her fiction.

Welty began publishing short stories in the 1930s; her first printed work was “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” appearing in the literary magazine Manuscript in 1936. In 1941, she compiled her short stories in the collection A Curtain of Green. This anthology introduced many signature features of her work. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Welty turned increasingly to longer fiction as well as continuing to sharpen her short-story craft. Novels like Delta Wedding (1946) and The Ponder Heart (1954) illustrate her interest in family, Southern social life, and humor. As she later recalled in One Writer’s Beginnings, seeing and listening were the foundational practices of her writing life.

In 1972, the writer achieved one of her highest honors when her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. That work, like much of her canon, revolves around themes of loss, memory, and family legacy. One Writer’s Beginnings signifies Welty’s devotion to intimate focus and universal human insight. Based on a series of lectures she delivered at Harvard in 1982, the memoir is divided into three parts: “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.” In these essays, Welty reflects on her childhood in Jackson, the sensory experiences of her early life, and the practice of attention that underpins her writing.

These areas of focus also shaped her life outside of writing. Welty was a keen photographer, and the images she recorded of Southern life served as inspiration for the intimate and detailed characterization in her stories. Her attention was also directed to the period of change and activism that drove the national narrative. Her 1963 short story “Where is the Voice Coming From?” was inspired by the assassination of Medgar Evers. The narrative, told from the perspective of a white murderer, explores the psychology and sense of entitlement that emerges from white supremacy.

She lived for most of her life in the family home on Pinehurst Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Her garden, filled with camellias and flowers planted by her mother and nurtured over decades, became a personal and symbolic locus of observation and cultivation—apt metaphors for her literary work. When she could no longer care for her garden, Welty offered one rule for those who would tend to it after her as a literary landmark: to preserve the history and integrity of the space. The attention that Welty gave her home appeared in her work, creating a loop of memory and perception that connected Welty’s life and writing in an endless circle.