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“I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Born April 13, 1909, Eudora Welty was a life-long resident of Jackson, Mississippi, and daughter of parents from the North, (Ohio, and West Virginia). According to Welty, her parents read avidly and passionately and were a close-knit, extended family, she tells us in her autobiographical work, One Writer’s Beginnings that her family sheltered her and protected her from outside forces of all sorts.

Welty usually wrote about the inhabitants of rural Mississippi. Her characters are comic, eccentric, often grotesque, but nonetheless charming; their reality is augmented by Welty’s wit and her skill at capturing their dialect and speech patterns. She never married. When asked why, she said in a New York Times interview, “it never came up.”

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Though she traveled extensively and lectured all across the country, she always called Jackson home.  She cared for her parents’ there and lived there, alone, after their passing.  Eudora Welty died in Jackson on July 23, 2001.

See our book review on The Optimist’s Daughter.

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