Eudora Welty: A Biography

The critics left us with decidedly mixed reviews. On the one hand, they were thrilled to peek inside the life of a writer so beloved and enigmatic. Marrs, who teaches at Millsaps College in Jackson, provides a welcome book in part because it replaces Ann Waldron's unauthorized biography, Eudora (1998). Yet too often Marrs loses the forest for the trees, recording the endless specifics of Welty's social calendar but not uncovering the meaning of her friendships. Still, she provides new insight in

The critics left us with decidedly mixed reviews. On the one hand, they were thrilled to peek inside the life of a writer so beloved and enigmatic. Marrs, who teaches at Millsaps College in Jackson, provides a welcome book in part because it replaces Ann Waldron's unauthorized biography, Eudora (1998). Yet too often Marrs loses the forest for the trees, recording the endless specifics of Welty's social calendar but not uncovering the meaning of her friendships. Still, she provides new insight into Welty's romances and adventurous nature. Another enterprising writer will no doubt undertake another biography in 2021, when Welty's correspondence with her mother, now sealed, is opened. Perhaps that next biography will give more texture to Welty's complex life.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

” I’ve always been tenacious in my feeling that we don’t need to know a writer’s life in order to understand his work and I have really felt very opposed to a lot of biographies

” I’ve always been tenacious in my feeling that we don’t need to know a writer’s life in order to understand his work and I have really felt very opposed to a lot of biographies that have been written these days, of which the reviewers say they’re not any good unless they reveal all sorts of other things about the writer . . . . . It’s brought out my inherent feeling that it’s good to know something about a writer’s background, but only what pertains.”
Source: Introduction xii

I attempt to present Eudora Welty’s life as fully as possible by allowing many voices to guide me – the voices in her fiction; the voices in her letters to friends, editors, colleagues; the voices of individuals who knew her not as a marble statue, but as a living, breathing, changing, developing, witty, sensitive, and complicated personality. Over the course of her ninety-two years, Eudora engaged the world with all her powers and never retreated into a single, narrowly defined role. Openness to experience complemented her creative genius and helped her to produce some of the most memorable fiction of the twentieth century. She was not the contentedly cloistered “Miss Eudora” in whom so many believed or wanted to believe, but was someone far more compassionate and compelling: a woman and a writer with a “triumphant vulnerability . . . to this mortal world.”
Source: Introduction xix

After Cornell, Eudora spent three days in New York, read at Barry college in Georgia, went to Washington for a National Council meeting, regrouped for four days at home, traveled to receive two honorary degrees – from Washington University and Kent State University – paused for two weeks at home (attending family parties and New Stage meetings), then went to Harvard for another honorary degree before flying directly to Santa Barbara.