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The Golden Apples
Welty is on home ground in the state of Mississippi in this collection of seven stories. She portrays the MacLains, the Starks, the Moodys, and other families of the fictitious town of Morgana. “I doubt that a better book about ‘the South’-one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life and its special tone and pattern-has ever been written” (New Yorker).
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1949
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About the author
Eudora Welty
222 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 - 30 of 140 reviews
January 2, 2020
Morgana, Ms is just like hundreds of small southern towns. Everybody knows everybody else, and their business, and everyone feels free to offer an opinion. Nothing much happens, except it does; children are the same as they have always been and always will be; time passes, children grow up, people age and die. The beauty of this book is Eudora Welty's prose, her eye for detail, her subtle, sly humor.
Little Jenny McLain's lizard earrings - "How do you get them to stay on your ears?". " You mash down on their heads".
Seven stories of the life and people of Morgana. A pleasure to read.
Little Jenny McLain's lizard earrings - "How do you get them to stay on your ears?". " You mash down on their heads".
Seven stories of the life and people of Morgana. A pleasure to read.
August 31, 2007
I hope Eudora Welty, who died recently, is not being slowly forgotten, and I hope also she is not slipping into the category of "beloved regional author" or some such nonsense. Welty was a major American writer who wrote some highly challenging artworks. This, for my money, is her best book. It is of an unusual genre: it's not a collection of short stories nor is it a novel. It is a unified art work made up of connected stories, or maybe I should say "pieces," since some of them aren't really stories and would make little sense without the whole book surrounding them. This book is about some inhabitants of a small town called Morgana, Mississippi; it is also about the intense loneliness of the human condition and the stubborn effort to break through the wall between the self and the other. It is about how, as Welty said somewhere, "we are the breakers of our own hearts."
Don't be misled by imagining that the most often anthologized Welty stories -- "A Worn Path" and "Why I Live at the P.O." -- sum up the dimensions of her work. They do not. Nothing wrong with either one, but those are kind of the beginner's level of Welty's fiction. I recommend getting her Collected Stories, which includes The Golden Apples. Read the whole thing. More on her other stories in a separate entries on the Collected Stories.
Don't be misled by imagining that the most often anthologized Welty stories -- "A Worn Path" and "Why I Live at the P.O." -- sum up the dimensions of her work. They do not. Nothing wrong with either one, but those are kind of the beginner's level of Welty's fiction. I recommend getting her Collected Stories, which includes The Golden Apples. Read the whole thing. More on her other stories in a separate entries on the Collected Stories.
January 11, 2020
What I know for sure about Eudora Welty’s short story collection, The Golden Apples, is that each story is filled with symbolism, sexual and mythical, and that the better part of it goes over my head. The stories are strange and mystical, while being at the same instant earthy and unpretentious. I’m pretty sure you could study these stories closely and write a doctoral thesis on them and still not know everything Welty is saying or implying.
The collection is built around the poem The Song of Wandering Aengus by W. B. Yeats.
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
In the poem, the narrator searches for the mythical beauty represented by the girl; Welty’s characters are searching as well, for beauty, for meaning, for a place to fit, for something greater in life. Each story builds upon the last in a cycle of revelations, but little is clearly stated and sometimes the true events and results of one story are not revealed until the next.
I would like to say I loved this collection, but perhaps I am growing lazy in my old age: it just required me to work too hard to get to the meaning and then left me feeling that I had probably missed at least half of it anyway.
I loved the poem!
The collection is built around the poem The Song of Wandering Aengus by W. B. Yeats.
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
In the poem, the narrator searches for the mythical beauty represented by the girl; Welty’s characters are searching as well, for beauty, for meaning, for a place to fit, for something greater in life. Each story builds upon the last in a cycle of revelations, but little is clearly stated and sometimes the true events and results of one story are not revealed until the next.
I would like to say I loved this collection, but perhaps I am growing lazy in my old age: it just required me to work too hard to get to the meaning and then left me feeling that I had probably missed at least half of it anyway.
I loved the poem!
September 28, 2019
3.5 stars
I have read Welty before and tried to understand her reasoning and writing. In this book of seven short stories it was a much easier job. Each of the seven stories - or parables - were linked together by either a character, a place or a circumstance. Southern life is well defined in this book since all stories take place in Morgana Mississippi.
Welty's writing is circular and witty, bizarre at times, but illuminating, beautiful depth, captivating, yet spiraling and confusing. Her description of people is staggering - well layered, fully featured, defyingly real. She puts you right in the mix of her slow moving southern towns and enigmatic town folk.
Although I have not fully accepted that I am a fan of Eudora Welty, I will say that this book may be one that should not be left unread.
I have read Welty before and tried to understand her reasoning and writing. In this book of seven short stories it was a much easier job. Each of the seven stories - or parables - were linked together by either a character, a place or a circumstance. Southern life is well defined in this book since all stories take place in Morgana Mississippi.
Welty's writing is circular and witty, bizarre at times, but illuminating, beautiful depth, captivating, yet spiraling and confusing. Her description of people is staggering - well layered, fully featured, defyingly real. She puts you right in the mix of her slow moving southern towns and enigmatic town folk.
Although I have not fully accepted that I am a fan of Eudora Welty, I will say that this book may be one that should not be left unread.
September 7, 2019
I think I needed to read this collection of seven linked stories in one go, not to leave days between them when I was not in Eudora Welty‘s world.
Members of the same families in the same small Mississippi town appear in all the stories, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes reappearing after a long absence, never all at the same time, not even when there is a great community gathering, as for a funeral.
Welty’s writing is poetic, sometimes the language is luminous. She was a brilliant photographer of southern life as well as a great US literary figure, and in this work her people, their country and their society come in and out of focus, almost as if she’s playing with lenses. The stories too are fractured. Although they are linked, they don’t form one story, but rather a group of scenes taken from different angle, arranged chronologically.
The introduction by Paul Binding to this Penguin edition refers to mythological meaning in some of the stories, and Welty herself draws in the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa in the last pages of the last story. I’m afraid I didn’t, couldn’t make these connections as I read, although I am familiar with the myths referred to.
I ended up feeling baffled by the extended symbolism and almost mystical ‘otherness’ of some passages. To understand Welty better, I would need to read her own writing on writing, and I don’t think I’m going to do that. So I’ll just have to accept my failure in comprehension and absorb her atmospheres.
Members of the same families in the same small Mississippi town appear in all the stories, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes reappearing after a long absence, never all at the same time, not even when there is a great community gathering, as for a funeral.
Welty’s writing is poetic, sometimes the language is luminous. She was a brilliant photographer of southern life as well as a great US literary figure, and in this work her people, their country and their society come in and out of focus, almost as if she’s playing with lenses. The stories too are fractured. Although they are linked, they don’t form one story, but rather a group of scenes taken from different angle, arranged chronologically.
The introduction by Paul Binding to this Penguin edition refers to mythological meaning in some of the stories, and Welty herself draws in the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa in the last pages of the last story. I’m afraid I didn’t, couldn’t make these connections as I read, although I am familiar with the myths referred to.
I ended up feeling baffled by the extended symbolism and almost mystical ‘otherness’ of some passages. To understand Welty better, I would need to read her own writing on writing, and I don’t think I’m going to do that. So I’ll just have to accept my failure in comprehension and absorb her atmospheres.
August 28, 2007
This book has been an albatross around my neck all freaking summer. I found it on a table of free books while out for a walk one day, and I thought, being a writer and a Southerner, perhaps I should read one of the most lauded Southern writers. There were a couple chapters of this book that I just loved, where I could see what all the fuss over Eudora Welty was about--she paints such a wonderful picture of small-town Southern life in the early 20th century that I could almost feel the shimmering heat of Morgana, Mississippi. (Or maybe that was just the heat of early 21st century Washington, D.C. right outside my door.) Unfortunately, I hated most of the rest of the book--some chapters relied too much on stream-of-consciousness narration for my taste, and it bounced around so much that I felt I never really got to know any of the inhabitants of Morgana. I'm glad I finally got to see what's so great (or not so great) about Eudora Welty, but it'll probably be a while before I'm brave enough to pick up another one of her books.
May 1, 2019
These interconnected stories were just amazing and beautiful.
One could just imagine the slow pace of life in the Deep South.
A book to take in slowly, the prose is poetic and Welty brings the characters to life.
One could just imagine the slow pace of life in the Deep South.
A book to take in slowly, the prose is poetic and Welty brings the characters to life.
April 29, 2021
In this justifiably famous collection of related short stories, Welty uses poetic, allusory language to elevate the quotidian life of small-town Mississippi (early 20th century) to mythic status. And she does so with remarkable creativity.
There are, of course, the Golden Apples of the title which Welty took from Yeats' poem The Song of Wandering Aengus. These invoke Hera's famous fruit tree guarded by the dragon, Ladon. Instead of Heracles attempting his eleventh labor, Welty gives us Loch Morrison, hanging upside down from a hackberry tree and plotting to steal the Maclain's mesmerizing figs. When they cracked open their pink and golden flesh would show, their inside flowers, and golden bubbles of juice would hang, to touch your tongue to first. Virgie Rainey, trying to outrun a lovesick sailor in hot pursuit, calls to mind Hippomenes' use of the same golden apples to distract Atalanta and claim her in marriage. Even the first story's title, The Shower of Gold, is a clear reference to the story of Danae, alerting the reader to the fact that King Maclain represents the powerful, globe-trotting, bed-hopping Zeus of Morgana. I definitely did not crack all of the codes, but there were enough in evidence to make this an interesting read.
On the basis of this collection, I do think Eudora Welty was better at capturing certain voices and characters than others. The women and children were very human: vibrant, complex, and believable; the men were more often avatars and viewed from outside rather than within. It's possible this was purposeful, with men intended to be the flawed gods of the tiny universe she created. If that is true then it worked more on the intellectual level than the emotional.
Very glad to finally have made Ms. Welty's acquaintance. I will definitely get to The Optimist's Daughter and The Robber Bridgegroom at some point.
There are, of course, the Golden Apples of the title which Welty took from Yeats' poem The Song of Wandering Aengus. These invoke Hera's famous fruit tree guarded by the dragon, Ladon. Instead of Heracles attempting his eleventh labor, Welty gives us Loch Morrison, hanging upside down from a hackberry tree and plotting to steal the Maclain's mesmerizing figs. When they cracked open their pink and golden flesh would show, their inside flowers, and golden bubbles of juice would hang, to touch your tongue to first. Virgie Rainey, trying to outrun a lovesick sailor in hot pursuit, calls to mind Hippomenes' use of the same golden apples to distract Atalanta and claim her in marriage. Even the first story's title, The Shower of Gold, is a clear reference to the story of Danae, alerting the reader to the fact that King Maclain represents the powerful, globe-trotting, bed-hopping Zeus of Morgana. I definitely did not crack all of the codes, but there were enough in evidence to make this an interesting read.
On the basis of this collection, I do think Eudora Welty was better at capturing certain voices and characters than others. The women and children were very human: vibrant, complex, and believable; the men were more often avatars and viewed from outside rather than within. It's possible this was purposeful, with men intended to be the flawed gods of the tiny universe she created. If that is true then it worked more on the intellectual level than the emotional.
Very glad to finally have made Ms. Welty's acquaintance. I will definitely get to The Optimist's Daughter and The Robber Bridgegroom at some point.
November 10, 2012
Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples is in some sense beyond the human mind; beyond what fiction addresses. Welty's fiction is poetry, but beyond poetry. It is complex in not supernatural ways, but maybe in superhuman ways: in ways that are real but that are beyond the human mind. Virgie, in the collection's closing story, "The Wanderers," is a fine example of this:
Meditation extends well beyond the natural world but to all people in Welty's Morgana, Mississippi: from bubbly socialites not quite like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to introverted men like Ran MacLain of "The Whole World Knows," these characters are subjects of Welty's meditation and are as lovely and clear to her as, "in the weeds a lightning bug [that] would lighten, on and off, on and off, for as long in the night as she was there to see."
*Page numbers are from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.
She knew that now at the river, where she had been before on moonlit nights in autumn, drunken and sleepless, mist lay on the water and filled the trees, and from the eyes to the moon would be a cone, a long silent horn, of white light. It was a connection visible as the hair is in air, between the self and the moon, to make the self feel the child, a daughter far, far back. Then the water, warmer than the night air or the self that might be suddenly cold, like any other arms, took the body under too, running without visibility into the mouth. As she would drift in the river, too alert, too insolent in her heart in those days, the mist might thin momentarily and brilliant jewel eyes would look out from the water-line and the bank. Sometimes in the weeds a lightning bug would lighten, on and off, on and off, for as long in the night as she was there to see. (454*)Nothing about the preceding paragraph is beyond reality, but it is indeed beyond normal human consciousness. It is like the book's characters are constantly within meditation, absorbing every detail around themselves: making even the minuscule "visible as the hair is in air."
Meditation extends well beyond the natural world but to all people in Welty's Morgana, Mississippi: from bubbly socialites not quite like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to introverted men like Ran MacLain of "The Whole World Knows," these characters are subjects of Welty's meditation and are as lovely and clear to her as, "in the weeds a lightning bug [that] would lighten, on and off, on and off, for as long in the night as she was there to see."
*Page numbers are from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.
March 18, 2011
The first time I read this book I absolutely hated it. Could not STAND it. I read it again recently, and whether it be time or age, I found the charm of Welty's writing that I missed the first time around.
What Welty does exceptionally well here is capture the feeling of small towns in the South. Everyone really DOES know everyone else's business, and lives are inextricably laced in _The Golden Apples_ as they are in real life. There are some stories in the book that I adore, and others that I could take or leave. However, if one were gone, the whole narrative would crumble. Welty masterfully strings out information and complicates characters through numerous stories, and I always smiled a bit when I saw an old face pop back up.
What I suspect turned me off the first time--and complicated my second reading--was the INTENSE amount of symbolic value within the narrative itself. Everyone stands for SOMETHING outside of themselves, and figuring out how all that fits together is not unlike doing one of those 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. Welty's delightful prose alleviates some of this, but I can't tell you how many "WTF" moments I had as I read along. I found this frustrating because it interrupted what was otherwise a delightful narrative. Also, there are just some characters in the book (I'm looking at you, King MacLain) that I loathed, which always leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
It's a shame there's not more work out there on Welty, and I fear that she doesn't have the place in American literature that she deserves. There is a TON of stuff floating around in _The Golden Apples_ that just begs to be analyzed.
What Welty does exceptionally well here is capture the feeling of small towns in the South. Everyone really DOES know everyone else's business, and lives are inextricably laced in _The Golden Apples_ as they are in real life. There are some stories in the book that I adore, and others that I could take or leave. However, if one were gone, the whole narrative would crumble. Welty masterfully strings out information and complicates characters through numerous stories, and I always smiled a bit when I saw an old face pop back up.
What I suspect turned me off the first time--and complicated my second reading--was the INTENSE amount of symbolic value within the narrative itself. Everyone stands for SOMETHING outside of themselves, and figuring out how all that fits together is not unlike doing one of those 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. Welty's delightful prose alleviates some of this, but I can't tell you how many "WTF" moments I had as I read along. I found this frustrating because it interrupted what was otherwise a delightful narrative. Also, there are just some characters in the book (I'm looking at you, King MacLain) that I loathed, which always leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
It's a shame there's not more work out there on Welty, and I fear that she doesn't have the place in American literature that she deserves. There is a TON of stuff floating around in _The Golden Apples_ that just begs to be analyzed.
February 7, 2020
The Golden Apples is a collection of short stories all about the seemingly normal, but in reality really odd people of fictional Morgana, Mississippi. Some stories are good, some weird and some are truly great short stories that immerse you in an experience from the characters’ perspectives. I felt like I was there . . . in the oppressive Mississippi heat, in the muddy-bottomed lake, along the cliffs in San Francisco, in the bedroom with a daughter immediately after her mother died, in the sitting room listening to a piano recital, from a young boys malaria bed watching the goings on at an abandoned neighbor’s house. Some stories are so beautifully clear that I can see, feel and taste along with the characters, many of whom seemed unsure or doubting of their own thoughts and feelings. Some stories are written as if they are a dream, although I’m pretty sure they’re not. And in one story I had no idea what was going on, only hints of something nefarious in the woods. She ends many of these tales with just a hint of closure, a hint that allows the reader’s mind to spin it forward in the imagination, the hallmark of a truly great short story writer.
Why I'm reading this: The Golden Apples is the January book pick of The Southern Literary Trail group. I've had this book lingering on my shelves for far too long.
Why I'm reading this: The Golden Apples is the January book pick of The Southern Literary Trail group. I've had this book lingering on my shelves for far too long.
August 9, 2023
No es que no ocurra nada importante en toda la obra, es que el cotilleo, la nimiedad y la anécdota son la religión del pueblo que se retrata. Eudora Welty describe un microcosmos en el que acentúa la visión del mundo a través de los ojos del vecino: vecinas que juzgan, vecinos que espían, vecinos que engañan, vecinas que se avergüenzan...Plasmando la totalidad social un numeroso conjunto de personas y familias mediante la representación de sus distintas voces, pinta un fresco lugareño a través de múltiples cambios de perspectiva. Calor, moscas, magnolios y cinamomos en flor; trenes de fondo que pasan por el puente sobre el Grande Negro; pianos y ukeleles como banda sonora: Morgana, pequeña ciudad ficticia de Mississippi.
Por cierto, Eudora también fue una estupenda fotógrafa.
Tomato Packer’s Recess, 1936
Por cierto, Eudora también fue una estupenda fotógrafa.
Tomato Packer’s Recess, 1936
April 21, 2013
One of the most amazing, beautiful, and striking series of short stories I've ever read. The characters are so layered and messy and complicated. They become real people by the time you reach the end and you're left grieving for some and relieved and happy for others. The last of the stories is particularly beautiful and won't ever be forgotten.
April 24, 2019
2.5 stars not because these stories are poorly written; I just didn't enjoy them personally. They took too much effort to read - maybe I'm getting lazy in my old age, but I got tired having to read the same sentence over and over to try to figure out what she was saying. She is very good at describing nature, but when she describes thoughts or emotions, her meaning becomes so elusive, almost like she knows what she means to say, but is purposefully keeping the reader in the dark. I get the feeling with these stories that she is writing for herself (or writing in a personal code) and doesn't quite want to share those thoughts entirely.
Most of these stories were way too long. I got exhausted reading 40+ page stories that meandered along without really saying anything, or anything that I could plainly decipher.
Most of these stories were way too long. I got exhausted reading 40+ page stories that meandered along without really saying anything, or anything that I could plainly decipher.
Want to read
September 29, 2023Contains the stories:
Shower of Gold -
June Recital -
Sir Rabbit -
Moon Lake -
The Whole World Knows -
Music from Spain -
The Wanderers -
Shower of Gold -
June Recital -
Sir Rabbit -
Moon Lake -
The Whole World Knows -
Music from Spain -
The Wanderers -
August 20, 2012
Welty is a titan. Ok, now that that's out of the way, this book is a collection of short stories that all relate to the same town "Morgana" and its townspeople...making it more novel-like than short-story-collection-like. I read in an interview with Welty that the town's name is based on the sea horizon mirage phenomenon "fata morgana." This hazy, dream-like misting in-and-out of mirage and reality perfectly characterizes the tone and structure of the book. It became a little bit my "white whale" to finish truthfully because the density of the prose was a stumbling block for me. Her narrative is sprinkled in between long lists of character names and dream like sequences, making it very slow to digest. I finally gave in to the book by letting the language wash over me and by paying less attention to who was who. Some of her descriptive passages are so exquisite and use such unique unexpected metaphors, that they take your breath away. She was an amazing literary mind and this book is a clear testament to that fact.
February 27, 2016
Beautifully written short stories about a fictional Mississippi town and its inhabitants.
April 25, 2017
Virgie walked down the hill too, crossed the road, and made her way through the old MacLain place and the pasture down to the river. She stood on the willow bank. It was bright as mid-afternoon in the openness of the water, quiet and peaceful. She took off her clothes and let herself into the river.
She saw her waist disappear into reflection less water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All seemed one weight, one matter -- until she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instant. the iron taste of the old river was sweet to her, though. If she opened her eyes she looked at blue bottles, the skating waterbugs. If she trembled, it was at the smoothness of a fish or a snake that crossed her knees.
In the middle of the river, whose downstream or upstream could not be told by a current, she lay on her stretched arm, not breathing, floating. Virgie had reached the point where in the next moment she might turn into something without feeling it shock her. She hung suspended in the Big Black River as she would know how to hang suspended in felicity. Far to the west, a cloud running fingerlike over the sun made her splash the water. She stood, walked along the soft mud of the bottom, and pulled herself out of the water by a willow branch, which like a warm rain brushed her back with its leaves.
The moon, while she looked into the high sky, took its own light between one moment and the next. A wood thrush, which had begun to sing, hushed its long moment and began again. Virgie put her clothes back on. She would have given much for a cigarette, always wishing for a little more of what had just been.
--from "The Wanderers" by Eudora Welty, in The Golden Apples.
*****************************************************
Unexpected! - very subtle, complex, intense stories, with lushly descriptive, poetic language. Another reviewer called them "beyond the human mind" and I had a similar sense, when I finished the last story: these stories are over my head - there's more here that I'm not getting yet. Stories to dwell on, almost to luxuriate in - except that some of them deal - subtly - with extreme interior suffering. But also relief, release, even moments of bliss, as in that passage from the Wanderers which I think might be the most beautiful passage I've read in any book, ever.
Whenever I've spent time in Mississippi, visiting my husband's relatives, I felt I could almost pass out and die from the overpoweringly intoxicating scents of flowers blooming everywhere, and Eudora captures not only that, but the similar overpowering social situations in her fictional small town where everyone knows everybody’s business, but hardly anyone is truly kind. But there are also these most transcendent moments and passages.
The first story, “Shower of Gold,” introduces the nearly mythical King MacLain, a man who wanders away from and back to his wife Snowdie, is “sighted” all over the country (like the dead Elvis) and rumored to be the father of many - but never really wants to know his twin legitimate sons Ran and Eugene - each of whom has his own, quite different, story, later in the book. Snowdie may be the only townsperson who is truly kind; even almost unbelievably so; but sustains wounds from the catty “pity” of the other women - who feel that dwelling on Snowdie “makes church holier.”
In “June Recital,” an innocent nine-year-old boy, Loch Morrison, watches from his window as a woman enters the abandoned house next to his, and sets about to burn the house down. The story then switches to the very different point of view of his traumatized sixteen-year-old sister, Cassie, the former student of the would-be-arsonist, Miss Eckhart - a single woman piano teacher, Yankee, German, isolated and thought of as “different.” Cassie recalls the ordeal of her piano lessons with Miss Eckhart who lived and had her studio in that now-abandoned house, where Miss Eckhart tried, not always successfully, to maintain her dignity in the face of abuse by a man rooming in the house, the death of the man she loved, and her infatuation with her precocious student, Virgie, who takes advantage of her teacher’s excessive devotion, becoming cocky.
Virgie - the town’s "wild girl" - the independent thinker- the one Miss Eckhart hoped would go on to greater things - now sneaks into the abandoned house to frolic with her sailor boyfriend - observed by the children next door. Virgie, also a loner who never marries, becomes the central character in the final story, The Wanderers, where she deals with her mother's death and then makes the decision to leave the town for good. This is the story that had grown on me most in memory.
"The Whole World Knows" tells the story of Ran MacClain, son of the infamous King MacClain. When he believes his new wife to be unfaithful, Ran moves out and rents a room nearby - but still in love with his wife, he goes every night to play cards and croquet with her and her presumed lover (who is also his co-worker.) He fantasizes about beating the lover to death with the croquet mallet, then goes back to his rented room and vomits. Everyone in town, particularly the old women, feels free to lavish Ran, in public, with their advice.The story escalates as he begins spending time with an innocent country girl who falls in love with him.
"Moon Lake" - maybe the most astonishing story - is an encounter between a group of town girls and a group of orphan girls that explores what it might mean to be an orphan, or, in the case of Easter, the "leader" of the orphans, a child abandoned first by her father and then by her mother, someone that "nobody is watching. Nobody cares." And at the same time, in the character of Nina, I thought Eudora may have been showing us a glimpse of her young self becoming an artist, longing to be able to inhabit the consciousness of Easter, "or a boy, or a Negro," to "become" someone other than herself.
She saw her waist disappear into reflection less water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All seemed one weight, one matter -- until she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instant. the iron taste of the old river was sweet to her, though. If she opened her eyes she looked at blue bottles, the skating waterbugs. If she trembled, it was at the smoothness of a fish or a snake that crossed her knees.
In the middle of the river, whose downstream or upstream could not be told by a current, she lay on her stretched arm, not breathing, floating. Virgie had reached the point where in the next moment she might turn into something without feeling it shock her. She hung suspended in the Big Black River as she would know how to hang suspended in felicity. Far to the west, a cloud running fingerlike over the sun made her splash the water. She stood, walked along the soft mud of the bottom, and pulled herself out of the water by a willow branch, which like a warm rain brushed her back with its leaves.
The moon, while she looked into the high sky, took its own light between one moment and the next. A wood thrush, which had begun to sing, hushed its long moment and began again. Virgie put her clothes back on. She would have given much for a cigarette, always wishing for a little more of what had just been.
--from "The Wanderers" by Eudora Welty, in The Golden Apples.
*****************************************************
Unexpected! - very subtle, complex, intense stories, with lushly descriptive, poetic language. Another reviewer called them "beyond the human mind" and I had a similar sense, when I finished the last story: these stories are over my head - there's more here that I'm not getting yet. Stories to dwell on, almost to luxuriate in - except that some of them deal - subtly - with extreme interior suffering. But also relief, release, even moments of bliss, as in that passage from the Wanderers which I think might be the most beautiful passage I've read in any book, ever.
Whenever I've spent time in Mississippi, visiting my husband's relatives, I felt I could almost pass out and die from the overpoweringly intoxicating scents of flowers blooming everywhere, and Eudora captures not only that, but the similar overpowering social situations in her fictional small town where everyone knows everybody’s business, but hardly anyone is truly kind. But there are also these most transcendent moments and passages.
The first story, “Shower of Gold,” introduces the nearly mythical King MacLain, a man who wanders away from and back to his wife Snowdie, is “sighted” all over the country (like the dead Elvis) and rumored to be the father of many - but never really wants to know his twin legitimate sons Ran and Eugene - each of whom has his own, quite different, story, later in the book. Snowdie may be the only townsperson who is truly kind; even almost unbelievably so; but sustains wounds from the catty “pity” of the other women - who feel that dwelling on Snowdie “makes church holier.”
In “June Recital,” an innocent nine-year-old boy, Loch Morrison, watches from his window as a woman enters the abandoned house next to his, and sets about to burn the house down. The story then switches to the very different point of view of his traumatized sixteen-year-old sister, Cassie, the former student of the would-be-arsonist, Miss Eckhart - a single woman piano teacher, Yankee, German, isolated and thought of as “different.” Cassie recalls the ordeal of her piano lessons with Miss Eckhart who lived and had her studio in that now-abandoned house, where Miss Eckhart tried, not always successfully, to maintain her dignity in the face of abuse by a man rooming in the house, the death of the man she loved, and her infatuation with her precocious student, Virgie, who takes advantage of her teacher’s excessive devotion, becoming cocky.
Virgie - the town’s "wild girl" - the independent thinker- the one Miss Eckhart hoped would go on to greater things - now sneaks into the abandoned house to frolic with her sailor boyfriend - observed by the children next door. Virgie, also a loner who never marries, becomes the central character in the final story, The Wanderers, where she deals with her mother's death and then makes the decision to leave the town for good. This is the story that had grown on me most in memory.
"The Whole World Knows" tells the story of Ran MacClain, son of the infamous King MacClain. When he believes his new wife to be unfaithful, Ran moves out and rents a room nearby - but still in love with his wife, he goes every night to play cards and croquet with her and her presumed lover (who is also his co-worker.) He fantasizes about beating the lover to death with the croquet mallet, then goes back to his rented room and vomits. Everyone in town, particularly the old women, feels free to lavish Ran, in public, with their advice.The story escalates as he begins spending time with an innocent country girl who falls in love with him.
"Moon Lake" - maybe the most astonishing story - is an encounter between a group of town girls and a group of orphan girls that explores what it might mean to be an orphan, or, in the case of Easter, the "leader" of the orphans, a child abandoned first by her father and then by her mother, someone that "nobody is watching. Nobody cares." And at the same time, in the character of Nina, I thought Eudora may have been showing us a glimpse of her young self becoming an artist, longing to be able to inhabit the consciousness of Easter, "or a boy, or a Negro," to "become" someone other than herself.
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April 14, 2021this is my professor’s favorite book... rip to us but happy for her that she is smart with a phd & everything
January 15, 2020
The only piece of writing by Eudora Welty I had read prior to picking up "The Golden Apples" was a her book of autobiographical essays called "One Writer's Beginnings." I think this was a good place to start. In it she describes how she learned to listen for stories in every day life. Growing up in the South where story telling is part of the fabric of everyday life equipped her with the ability to see and hear stories that most of us might pass by without a second thought. In "One Writer's beginnings" she tells how she learned to see stories as through the lens of a camera:
"The frame through which I viewed the world changed too. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined to any frame."
This understanding of Eudora Welty's way of seeing people really enhanced my experience of reading "The Golden Apples." None of the characters she has created are insignificant. She never judges them. She simply tells you their story."They" are the inhabitants of the small southern town of Morgana,Mississippi. Each story in this collection could be a stand-alone story. Taken together, however, these seven short stories weave a tapestry of life in this town over the first 50 odd years of the twentieth century. Stories of individuals are told but as you progress through the collection you can see how characters move in and out of each others' lives, how they touch each other and effect each other, some effecting others' lives while not being present or even having knowledge that their actions are resonating with others over time and space. Eudora Welty manages to capture life on a personal, internal level as well as over a physical, geographical space.
To me her writing exhibits the honest storytelling tradition of the American south with well-executed moments of stream-of-consciousness style narrative.
Not all of the short stories in this volume were to my taste.However, taken as a whole "The Golden Apples" is a stunning, well-executed, and thought-provoking piece of literature.
"The frame through which I viewed the world changed too. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined to any frame."
This understanding of Eudora Welty's way of seeing people really enhanced my experience of reading "The Golden Apples." None of the characters she has created are insignificant. She never judges them. She simply tells you their story."They" are the inhabitants of the small southern town of Morgana,Mississippi. Each story in this collection could be a stand-alone story. Taken together, however, these seven short stories weave a tapestry of life in this town over the first 50 odd years of the twentieth century. Stories of individuals are told but as you progress through the collection you can see how characters move in and out of each others' lives, how they touch each other and effect each other, some effecting others' lives while not being present or even having knowledge that their actions are resonating with others over time and space. Eudora Welty manages to capture life on a personal, internal level as well as over a physical, geographical space.
To me her writing exhibits the honest storytelling tradition of the American south with well-executed moments of stream-of-consciousness style narrative.
Not all of the short stories in this volume were to my taste.However, taken as a whole "The Golden Apples" is a stunning, well-executed, and thought-provoking piece of literature.
April 7, 2013
She pressed through a haw thicket and through the cherry trees. With a tree-high seesawing of boughs a squirrel chase ran ahead of her through the woods - Morgan's Woods, as it used to be called. Fat birds were rocking on their perches. A little quail ran on the woods floor. Down an arch, some old cedar lane up here, Mattie Will could look away into the big West. She could see the drift of it all, the stretched land below the little hills, and the Big Black, clear to MacLain's Courthouse, almost, the Stark place plain and the fields, and their farm, everybody's house above trees, the MacLains' - the white floating peak - and even Blackstone's granny's cabin, where there had been a murder one time. And Morgana all in rays, like a giant sunflower in the dust of Saturday."
The character of these stories is immensely generous: the prose overflows with mythic music, time passes into place, people are formed and reformed as folklore and events enlarge to the Homeric. And somehow this is all boundlessly human and sad.
You encounter no small difficulty in describing a book like this, because its choice ground lies somewhere between the novel and the short story collection. That is, between broad lakes and small rivers. Some of these are short stories. One or two look happily the length of novellas. And others are barely tales at all. These last look like collecting pools that only take substantial shape when waters rise; the pools gain body from rivers and the rivers gain new shape in flooding the pools. Bathe in it. Drink it in handfuls.
November 20, 2020
The book is deceptively short because there is such depth in each story. I had to slow my reading down to get the most from them.
I totally love her writing and as always when I find an author to love I read around the subject. She is a very interesting woman and her use of mythology is impressive.
On YouTube there are some uploads of Welty reading some of her stories and interviews with her, one with her and Gore Vidal which found most interesting.
I read somewhere that a classic is a book that demands several rereads and like wine, the full flavour comes out over time. Based on this definition then this is a classic. I will need to re-read this at some future point.
The book I have comes from the library and is the complete stories. This is a book I would like to keep on my shelf and maybe try each of the books of stories at a rate of one a year. Maybe for summertime reading for me because I get SAD and winter is not my best time mentally. And Welty definitely exercises one's mental muscles.
I totally love her writing and as always when I find an author to love I read around the subject. She is a very interesting woman and her use of mythology is impressive.
On YouTube there are some uploads of Welty reading some of her stories and interviews with her, one with her and Gore Vidal which found most interesting.
I read somewhere that a classic is a book that demands several rereads and like wine, the full flavour comes out over time. Based on this definition then this is a classic. I will need to re-read this at some future point.
The book I have comes from the library and is the complete stories. This is a book I would like to keep on my shelf and maybe try each of the books of stories at a rate of one a year. Maybe for summertime reading for me because I get SAD and winter is not my best time mentally. And Welty definitely exercises one's mental muscles.
April 15, 2019
There's some wonderful writing in here, and beautifully shaped images. Unfortunately, they are buried beneath the weight of Welty's efforts to load virtually every phrase of every sentence of every paragraph with some deep, metaphorical, symbolic, poetic meaning, most of which leaves the reader at a loss. Characters say and do things that at best are non-sequiturs, and at worse completely dumbfounding (for instance, the way the onlookers behave when Loch is trying to revive Easter from drowning), and at times dialogue almost seems to have been written in a vacuum then selected randomly for insertion into a scene. I can make allowances for southern mannerisms, colloquialisms, etc., but much of this just seemed nonsensical. All of which is unfortunate, because some of the scenes and the way they are viewed by characters, bear such potential poignancy, that it's a shame Welty or editors didn't trim back a few layers of the overgrowth so you could more easily find the blooms.
March 26, 2014
Why did it take me so long to read more Eudora Welty? We should all just be reading Eudora Welty all the time.
December 7, 2025
i feel like i'll be pondering this one for a long time... with much confusion.
August 15, 2021
Probably 3.5 stars. Sometimes a little elusive, but beautifully written and often moving.
April 16, 2021
The back cover copy of my Penguin Modern Classics edition of this book claims that it’s primarily about the relationship between Virgie Rainey and her piano teacher Miss Eckhart. Such a weird focus can be forgiven in the blurb of a book this vague with regard to the concepts of ‘central characters’ and ‘driving plot’, but equally it’s clear to me that the story is about the MacLaine twins and everyone’s relationship – peripheral or otherwise – to them. Why else would they show up (albeit in mentions) in stories that have nothing to do with them, like Easter’s near-drowning?
Overall, while I didn’t precisely like this book, I respected what it was trying to do. I was a bit impatient and distracted most of the time I was reading it, and unfortunately for my experience, it’s a book that rewards a slow and contemplative consumption. Despite a strong start in the opening story – told from the point of view of Katie Rainey – I lost the chance to sustain an emotional connection because of the way the subsequent linked story meandered off into discussing the malaria symptoms of the MacLains' neighbour, Loch Morrison. I felt – both years ago when I bought and first tried to read this book, and now – that Welty rather squandered the rapport she’d built up with me about Snowdie and King and the twins. I fully didn’t care about Loch and why he was stuck in his room and what his sister and servant were up to. Go back to King and his disappearing act, please!
I thus lacked interest in where Welty took the story, to Virgie and Miss Eckhart and later to Jinny Stark, and then the twins again. Welty the writer keeps herself at arms’ length from her characters, circling round them in a bird’s eye view and occasionally darting in to peck out bits of detail. I feel this despite the fact that some of the linked stories are deeply interior and focused entirely on the narrating character’s own navel.
It’s a very evocative novel and Welty wears her technical skills lightly. All the same, I found myself rushing over passages to get to the ‘bit’ that mattered, and not missing much of what I skimmed, which says to me the balance needed tipping a little more in the ‘service the plot’ direction. A three-point-fiver if ever I saw one. I would definitely read more of her work, but not in a hurry.
She’s really very good at cat descriptions, which always wins me over.
“Like a little white kitty in a basket, making you wonder if she just mightn’t put up her paw and scratch, if anything was, after all, to come near.”
“A tortoise-shell cat pillowed in apples gazed at him from a grocer’s window. She pulled her round eyes closed as on little drawstrings.”
And description in general:
“She had wasting legs that showed knifelike down her long skirt, and clumsy-shaped, suffering feet that she placed just so out in front of her on the step of her chair, as if she wanted you to think they were pretty.”
“And Bertsingers’ never had a neon sign over his cage in the repair department. There was some dignity left to everything, if you knew where to find it.”
“You know he constitutionally brought home the kind of presents that break your heart.”
And you wonder why I wanted to hear more about King and less about irritable Loch Morrison!
Overall, while I didn’t precisely like this book, I respected what it was trying to do. I was a bit impatient and distracted most of the time I was reading it, and unfortunately for my experience, it’s a book that rewards a slow and contemplative consumption. Despite a strong start in the opening story – told from the point of view of Katie Rainey – I lost the chance to sustain an emotional connection because of the way the subsequent linked story meandered off into discussing the malaria symptoms of the MacLains' neighbour, Loch Morrison. I felt – both years ago when I bought and first tried to read this book, and now – that Welty rather squandered the rapport she’d built up with me about Snowdie and King and the twins. I fully didn’t care about Loch and why he was stuck in his room and what his sister and servant were up to. Go back to King and his disappearing act, please!
I thus lacked interest in where Welty took the story, to Virgie and Miss Eckhart and later to Jinny Stark, and then the twins again. Welty the writer keeps herself at arms’ length from her characters, circling round them in a bird’s eye view and occasionally darting in to peck out bits of detail. I feel this despite the fact that some of the linked stories are deeply interior and focused entirely on the narrating character’s own navel.
It’s a very evocative novel and Welty wears her technical skills lightly. All the same, I found myself rushing over passages to get to the ‘bit’ that mattered, and not missing much of what I skimmed, which says to me the balance needed tipping a little more in the ‘service the plot’ direction. A three-point-fiver if ever I saw one. I would definitely read more of her work, but not in a hurry.
She’s really very good at cat descriptions, which always wins me over.
“Like a little white kitty in a basket, making you wonder if she just mightn’t put up her paw and scratch, if anything was, after all, to come near.”
“A tortoise-shell cat pillowed in apples gazed at him from a grocer’s window. She pulled her round eyes closed as on little drawstrings.”
And description in general:
“She had wasting legs that showed knifelike down her long skirt, and clumsy-shaped, suffering feet that she placed just so out in front of her on the step of her chair, as if she wanted you to think they were pretty.”
“And Bertsingers’ never had a neon sign over his cage in the repair department. There was some dignity left to everything, if you knew where to find it.”
“You know he constitutionally brought home the kind of presents that break your heart.”
And you wonder why I wanted to hear more about King and less about irritable Loch Morrison!
July 21, 2009
I don't care for short stories but Eudora Welty is such an interesting writer. Her stories have the subtle strangeness of Flannery O'Conner's stories. She makes us see mundane events for the peculiarness that exists within them.
February 10, 2008
I admit I was confused half the time by the twists and turns in both dialogue and plot. But it was a pleasant kind of mental exercise.
September 20, 2009
Hard to get into initially because she writes in circles and the language is unfamiliar. But hang in there, it's so rewarding! so beautiful.
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