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The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews
Much like her highly acclaimed One Writer's Beginnings, The Eye of the Story offers Eudora Welty's invaluable meditations on the art of writing. In addition to seven essays on craft, this collection brings together her penetrating and instructive commentaries on a wide variety of individual writers, including Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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About the author
Eudora Welty
224 books1,013 followersEudora Alice Welty was an award-winning American author who wrote short stories and novels about the American South. Her book The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.
Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia Business School. While at Columbia University, where she was the captain of the women's polo team, Welty was a regular at Romany Marie's café in 1930.
During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs.
Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the legendary and oft-anthologized stories "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man," and "A Worn Path." Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story, and was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, where, despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of her hometown.
Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson.
Excerpted and adopted from Wikipedia.
Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia Business School. While at Columbia University, where she was the captain of the women's polo team, Welty was a regular at Romany Marie's café in 1930.
During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs.
Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the legendary and oft-anthologized stories "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Petrified Man," and "A Worn Path." Her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story, and was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, where, despite her fame, she was still a common sight among the people of her hometown.
Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson.
Excerpted and adopted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
December 1, 2018
Eudora Welty is not just a southern writer, she is a true intellectual. Her essays here on authors, the writing life, book reviews, and short pieces on her life in Jackson, Mississippi show the scope of her intelligence and the ability to relay her feelings on the written page. It's easy to see why she is so respected. She was also a photographer, an avid gardener, and a copious letter writer who corresponded with dozens of friends. What a lady!
October 11, 2016
I bought this collection of essays, reviews and personal pieces at my first visit to Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi, a few years ago. The bookstore, understandably enough, claims Eudora Welty as its own, including with each purchase a sturdy, perfect-in-every-way bookmark devoted to Welty. A lovely photograph of an introspective, thoughtful younger Welty graces its front. All my reading of Welty, including this volume, reinforces the trustworthiness and honesty I find in that portrait. I don’t believe she was capable of writing a dishonest word, much less a sentence; and though I’ve sometimes wondered what it means when an author is called “moral”, with Welty, I think I’ve found my answer.
Below the photograph on the bookmark is a cut-out circle with the words “Experienced Reality” above and below. I take this circle to emphasize “the eye of the story”.
Below the photograph on the bookmark is a cut-out circle with the words “Experienced Reality” above and below. I take this circle to emphasize “the eye of the story”.
November 18, 2017
erudite lady
If Eudora Welty had been Edward Welty, she would have won a lot more honors and maybe even a Nobel Prize. Not only did she write great stories and novels, but she also wrote very literate, erudite essays on a variety of topics. Maybe she never hung out in Paris with the intellectuals beloved of the Nobel Prize committees, maybe she stayed pretty close to home, down there in Mississippi, but she sure could write. If you aren't quite up on Literature itself, a lot of the essays in this book are going to drag terribly. However, in this case, I would put that fact on you (or me), not on the essays. It's just that if you haven't read Jane Austen, Stephen Green (I had not even heard of him), Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Chekhov, E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, and a lot more, you really won't get what she is talking about. I mean, it's not Cliff's Notes exactly ! Still, anyone will appreciate the "personal and occasional" pieces which describe places, people, and life patterns in her world, that now long-gone world of Jackson, Mississippi and surrounding country. If essays and reviews are your thing---and if not, why are you reading this one ?!---then you might want to give THE EYE OF THE STORY a whirl. You'll find something very memorable for sure.
If Eudora Welty had been Edward Welty, she would have won a lot more honors and maybe even a Nobel Prize. Not only did she write great stories and novels, but she also wrote very literate, erudite essays on a variety of topics. Maybe she never hung out in Paris with the intellectuals beloved of the Nobel Prize committees, maybe she stayed pretty close to home, down there in Mississippi, but she sure could write. If you aren't quite up on Literature itself, a lot of the essays in this book are going to drag terribly. However, in this case, I would put that fact on you (or me), not on the essays. It's just that if you haven't read Jane Austen, Stephen Green (I had not even heard of him), Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Chekhov, E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, and a lot more, you really won't get what she is talking about. I mean, it's not Cliff's Notes exactly ! Still, anyone will appreciate the "personal and occasional" pieces which describe places, people, and life patterns in her world, that now long-gone world of Jackson, Mississippi and surrounding country. If essays and reviews are your thing---and if not, why are you reading this one ?!---then you might want to give THE EYE OF THE STORY a whirl. You'll find something very memorable for sure.
August 26, 2019
I’m a big fan of Eudora Welty. I don’t always love her books, but I always love her voice. And in this collection, she uses that voice to share in-depth knowledge about writers and writing. It’s broken down into four sections: writers, writing, book reviews and a selection of miscellaneous essays.
In the Writers section she digs deep to unearth little gems about significant authors. For example, on Chekhov, I love this: “It was his plainest intention that we never should hear him telling us what we should think or feel or believe. He is not trying to teach us, through his characters; he only asks us to understand them.”
The Writing section, “On Writing,” is something I’ve read before, but feel I could read it forever and never grasp it all. If you give it some concentration, you come away with quite an education. Here’s an idea worth spending some time on: “Making reality real is art’s responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving its impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader’s illusion.”
Most of her reviews were about authors I don’t yet know. She did, however, convince me to re-read Charlotte’s Web, and had—not surprisingly--some brilliant insight into Faulkner. I found his quotes she shared about why he wrote such long sentences fascinating. Basically, he believed the past wasn’t past, but existed within each person, and the long sentence was an attempt to get their past and future into the present moment. How cool is that?
The essays at the end were some that don’t necessarily have broad appeal--an address to the Mississippi Historical Society, for example. But what came through in all of them was her sense of place—that aspect of her fiction that so many of us love.
“All the years we lived in that house where we children were born, the same people lived in the other houses on our street too. People changed through the arithmetic of birth, marriage and death, but not by going away. So families just accrued stories, which through the fullness of time, in those times, their own lives made. And I grew up in those.”
Those stories that Eudora Welty grew up in made her the unique writer she was. I learned so much from her, and thoroughly enjoyed spending time in this collection.
In the Writers section she digs deep to unearth little gems about significant authors. For example, on Chekhov, I love this: “It was his plainest intention that we never should hear him telling us what we should think or feel or believe. He is not trying to teach us, through his characters; he only asks us to understand them.”
The Writing section, “On Writing,” is something I’ve read before, but feel I could read it forever and never grasp it all. If you give it some concentration, you come away with quite an education. Here’s an idea worth spending some time on: “Making reality real is art’s responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving its impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader’s illusion.”
Most of her reviews were about authors I don’t yet know. She did, however, convince me to re-read Charlotte’s Web, and had—not surprisingly--some brilliant insight into Faulkner. I found his quotes she shared about why he wrote such long sentences fascinating. Basically, he believed the past wasn’t past, but existed within each person, and the long sentence was an attempt to get their past and future into the present moment. How cool is that?
The essays at the end were some that don’t necessarily have broad appeal--an address to the Mississippi Historical Society, for example. But what came through in all of them was her sense of place—that aspect of her fiction that so many of us love.
“All the years we lived in that house where we children were born, the same people lived in the other houses on our street too. People changed through the arithmetic of birth, marriage and death, but not by going away. So families just accrued stories, which through the fullness of time, in those times, their own lives made. And I grew up in those.”
Those stories that Eudora Welty grew up in made her the unique writer she was. I learned so much from her, and thoroughly enjoyed spending time in this collection.
September 20, 2014
Beautiful, thoughtful essays by one of America's greatest short story writers. Eudora, you'll always have my heart.
July 8, 2023
I love having Eudora Welty in my life, so The Eye of the Story was a pleasure to dip into over the course of many weeks. Not every essay knocked my socks off — especially the reviews of books/authors I haven’t read (Patrick White, S.J. Perelman, George R. Stewart). But Welty is so thoughtful (in both senses — she’s kind and intelligent) that I found much to appreciate and ponder.
One of the things I enjoyed most is the way Welty sees reading and writing as imaginative activities. Her way of thinking about books and authors is impressionistic and produces insights that allow meaning to blossom rather than nailing it down and analyzing the life out of it. She leaves the mystery intact, while holding it up for us to wonder at. As she writes,
“The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life. In writing, do we try to solve this mystery? No, I think we take hold of the other end of the stick. In very practical ways, we rediscover the mystery.”
Welty’s approach is the antidote to those terrible readers’ guides offered by publishers which have such a dampening, deadening effect. For Welty, fiction is “made by the imagination for the imagination… made by art out of, and in order to show, and to be, some human truth.” And the key to grasping that truth is less by way of analysis than through imagination and feeling.
We see Welty’s approach to reading in her reviews. She gives impressions that readers can take with them into the books of Elizabeth Bowen, Jane Austen, William Faulkner or Ross Macdonald. Her ideas open our imaginative eye to the human truths these writers are exploring.
The Eye of the Story has more than reviews and essays on writing. Welty’s recollections of her childhood and hometown of Jackson, Mississippi are delightful. I worried they’d be like the ramblings of an aged aunt, but the anecdotes Welty tells — of Ida M’Toy, the eccentric, queenly midwife-turned-used-clothing-vendor, or of walking home from the little store via a storm sewer, clutching a loaf of bread her mother had sent her to buy — give the reader another cherished opportunity to see the world from Welty’s intelligent, generous point of view.
**Originally published on my website brightwingswellness.com.
One of the things I enjoyed most is the way Welty sees reading and writing as imaginative activities. Her way of thinking about books and authors is impressionistic and produces insights that allow meaning to blossom rather than nailing it down and analyzing the life out of it. She leaves the mystery intact, while holding it up for us to wonder at. As she writes,
“The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life. In writing, do we try to solve this mystery? No, I think we take hold of the other end of the stick. In very practical ways, we rediscover the mystery.”
Welty’s approach is the antidote to those terrible readers’ guides offered by publishers which have such a dampening, deadening effect. For Welty, fiction is “made by the imagination for the imagination… made by art out of, and in order to show, and to be, some human truth.” And the key to grasping that truth is less by way of analysis than through imagination and feeling.
We see Welty’s approach to reading in her reviews. She gives impressions that readers can take with them into the books of Elizabeth Bowen, Jane Austen, William Faulkner or Ross Macdonald. Her ideas open our imaginative eye to the human truths these writers are exploring.
The Eye of the Story has more than reviews and essays on writing. Welty’s recollections of her childhood and hometown of Jackson, Mississippi are delightful. I worried they’d be like the ramblings of an aged aunt, but the anecdotes Welty tells — of Ida M’Toy, the eccentric, queenly midwife-turned-used-clothing-vendor, or of walking home from the little store via a storm sewer, clutching a loaf of bread her mother had sent her to buy — give the reader another cherished opportunity to see the world from Welty’s intelligent, generous point of view.
**Originally published on my website brightwingswellness.com.
November 18, 2018
The Eye of the Story is lush, literate, filled with almost languid richness.
I can only imagine being so well read that I could recognize all of her references to other writers and the vast literature of novels and short stories. I envy the breadth of her engagement with the world of fiction.
I’m more interested in what she has to say about writing.
“We who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination” (p. 134).
“Each work is new” (p. 135). Welty is talking about novels, but this also is true, so true, of poetry. She observes that, in the fiction of her contemplation, “words have been found for which there may be no other words” (p. 137).
“The imagination has to be involved, and more—ignited. How much brighter than the symbol can be the explicit observation that springs firsthand from deep and present feeling…” (p. 139).
“It is through the shaping of the work in the hands of the artist that you most nearly come to know what can be known, on the page, of his mind and heart, and his as apart from the others. No other saw life in an ordering exactly like this” (p. 144).
I find affirmation in The Eye of the Story. Welty declares that writing is an art that uses the literally infinite array of words in sequence to create a spectacular, unique exhibition of what’s in the writer’s mind and in her heart.
“Each work is new.” I believe that each poem is unique. Each engaged reader takes a new step on new ground each time he reads the poem.
The poet opens a new window in her mind each time she takes the quill in hand.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com
I can only imagine being so well read that I could recognize all of her references to other writers and the vast literature of novels and short stories. I envy the breadth of her engagement with the world of fiction.
I’m more interested in what she has to say about writing.
“We who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination” (p. 134).
“Each work is new” (p. 135). Welty is talking about novels, but this also is true, so true, of poetry. She observes that, in the fiction of her contemplation, “words have been found for which there may be no other words” (p. 137).
“The imagination has to be involved, and more—ignited. How much brighter than the symbol can be the explicit observation that springs firsthand from deep and present feeling…” (p. 139).
“It is through the shaping of the work in the hands of the artist that you most nearly come to know what can be known, on the page, of his mind and heart, and his as apart from the others. No other saw life in an ordering exactly like this” (p. 144).
I find affirmation in The Eye of the Story. Welty declares that writing is an art that uses the literally infinite array of words in sequence to create a spectacular, unique exhibition of what’s in the writer’s mind and in her heart.
“Each work is new.” I believe that each poem is unique. Each engaged reader takes a new step on new ground each time he reads the poem.
The poet opens a new window in her mind each time she takes the quill in hand.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com
April 18, 2023
I had become aware of Eudora Welty only two months ago. I elected to read this anthology as a way to sample her work. And having done so, I have become a fan.
One signal virtue of writers who stay in the locale where they were reared is their ability to write so eloquently that we earnestly begin to "see" their home environments.
Here's one line that sticks: "Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure." (Page 299, from her story, "Some Notes on River Country.") There is the quality of truth in this -- and other -- lines that she wrote about her life in Mississippi.
One signal virtue of writers who stay in the locale where they were reared is their ability to write so eloquently that we earnestly begin to "see" their home environments.
Here's one line that sticks: "Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure." (Page 299, from her story, "Some Notes on River Country.") There is the quality of truth in this -- and other -- lines that she wrote about her life in Mississippi.
Read
June 2, 2019Not for the average erotica fan. However, if you enjoy philosophy, you like Venus in Furs and Marquis de Sade and enjoy a little bizarre in your fantasies, this is for you.
dropped
August 10, 2020College reads: I only read chapters/sections relevant to my studies, hence the dnf
Want to read
October 1, 2024Bought at Oxfam, in Oxford
September 27, 2024
September 27, 2024
August 25, 2025
This splendid collection is full of wisdom about writing and writers. Eudora Welty, a great writer herself, can zero in on what makes the work of other writers special, worth reading and studying.
February 2, 2013
I'm slogging my way through this. It's divided into four parts: On Writers, which is analysis of the body of works of five different writers; On Writing, which is, I believe, advice to writers; Reviews, which appears to be reviews of fifteen specific works by writers; and Personal and Occasional Pieces, which is eight works that are, I suppose, exactly what the section title says.
I bought this mainly for the second section, but thought I should read the first part first. I'm five pages from finishing the fourth review, but I just can't go on with this, and will skip ahead to part two tomorrow. Welty's language is very dense, and leaves me dense. I can't tell what she's saying. The English is good, as you would expect. Sentences are grammatical, she doesn't use overly long or obscure words, but the concepts are written in such a scholarly manner—at least I assume it's scholarly—that I can't understand it. Here's an example.
"In this landscape we are made as aware of what isn't as of what is. There is no recent past. There is no middle distance; the perspectives of time and space run unbroken, unmarked, unmeasured to the vanishing point. With nothing in between, the living foreground and that almost mythological, almost phantasmagorial background are all but made for one, as in a Chinese painting—and exactly as in one of the mirages that Willa Cather's people often meet, quite casually, in the desert:"
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what that means.
I'll slog through part 2, at least the beginning, and hopefully come back and write more when I have more to say.
ETA: The book got a little better as I went through it. The last several chapters of part 2, writing advice, were clearer than the earlier ones. All the chapters of part 3, literary criticism of specific works, were clear and held my interest. I read only the first two chapters in part 4, miscellaneous personal pieces. They read like a historical travel log of rural Mississippi. The writing was fine, but that's not what I want to read right now.
I'm putting this on my bookshelf. Perhaps I'll get to it somewhere down the line, and find it more comprehensible and valuable. Back now to my regular reading pile.
I bought this mainly for the second section, but thought I should read the first part first. I'm five pages from finishing the fourth review, but I just can't go on with this, and will skip ahead to part two tomorrow. Welty's language is very dense, and leaves me dense. I can't tell what she's saying. The English is good, as you would expect. Sentences are grammatical, she doesn't use overly long or obscure words, but the concepts are written in such a scholarly manner—at least I assume it's scholarly—that I can't understand it. Here's an example.
"In this landscape we are made as aware of what isn't as of what is. There is no recent past. There is no middle distance; the perspectives of time and space run unbroken, unmarked, unmeasured to the vanishing point. With nothing in between, the living foreground and that almost mythological, almost phantasmagorial background are all but made for one, as in a Chinese painting—and exactly as in one of the mirages that Willa Cather's people often meet, quite casually, in the desert:"
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what that means.
I'll slog through part 2, at least the beginning, and hopefully come back and write more when I have more to say.
ETA: The book got a little better as I went through it. The last several chapters of part 2, writing advice, were clearer than the earlier ones. All the chapters of part 3, literary criticism of specific works, were clear and held my interest. I read only the first two chapters in part 4, miscellaneous personal pieces. They read like a historical travel log of rural Mississippi. The writing was fine, but that's not what I want to read right now.
I'm putting this on my bookshelf. Perhaps I'll get to it somewhere down the line, and find it more comprehensible and valuable. Back now to my regular reading pile.
May 2, 2010
I am learning a lot from this brilliant fiction writer in this, one of her only works of non fiction. Not only does she share her own insight about fiction writing, she reviews and critiques some of my favorite writers, like Katherine Anne Porter, E.B. White, and William Faulkner.
So far...so great!!
So far...so great!!
November 8, 2016
The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty is beautifully written. Every essay makes you analyse pieces in a different way. It is a different prospective. I enjoyed reading it very much and would recommend it to any reader or writer.
July 17, 2010
Dry, intellectual textbook of reviews well-known, authors and their writings and on writing.. Did not finish
June 30, 2011
Note for future: keep coming back to this.
December 18, 2017
3 3/4 stars
April 24, 2008
Amazing. Incredible.
August 2, 2011
I pick it up often for inspiration. Eudora Welty... one of my favorite writers.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews