Eudora welty biography summary of winston agency

Eudora Welty is so much associated with Mississippi in particular and the South in general that it may be surprising to learn that she was not the descendant of a long line of Mississippians; her parents were in fact relatively recent immigrants to that state at the time Welty was born. Her mother had been born and raised in West Virginia, her father in Ohio, but Welty herself grew up in the South and imbibed its sounds, sights, and smells in a way that allowed her to achieve, in her fiction, an incomparable feel for the place and its people.

Yet, Welty is no mere regionalist; as did many of the greatest writers of the 20th century a number of them, as she was, born and bred in the South , she drew on a specific local habitation to deal with timeless human experiences, emotions, and concerns. She lived much of her life in a relatively small southern city, but her vision was both wide and deep.

Welty was born on April 13, , in Jackson, Mississippi the state capital. These experiences undoubtedly helped lead to an especially close bond with her parents and her younger brothers, Edward and Walter who arrived in and , respectively. But I was present in the room with the chief secret there was—the two of them, father and mother, sitting there as one.

I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn of mind, the nature of temperament, of a privileged observer; and owing to the way I became so, it turned out that I became the loving kind.

Welty's writing was based on the life of small town and rural Mississippi which was intimately familiar to her.

Reflecting upon her childhood, Welty recalled going on casual Sunday drives, taking long car trips back to West Virginia and Ohio, attending plays and concerts, going to movies, and of course visiting the library Ford and Kreyling In fall she entered Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, where she planned to focus on writing; while there, she published fiction, poetry, and artwork in campus publications and met and befriended people from diverse sections of the state and was particularly struck by their varied accents.

Another opportunity to expand her geographical and cultural horizons presented itself when she transferred in to the University of Wisconsin in Madison known for its fine liberal arts program , where she studied literature and art and became particularly interested in the modern writers, especially William Butler Yeats. She graduated from Wisconsin where she had unfortunately felt somewhat isolated in , having by now displayed talent as a poet, artist, photographer, and writer of fiction.

Unfortunately, was also the year in which the United States entered the Great Depression—the huge economic collapse that darkened life for many Americans for much of the next decade. Welty, on the advice of her ever-practical father, enrolled in in a one-year advertising program at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University in New York City; if she could not make a living as a creative writer, she could at least help support herself by using her various talents in pragmatic ways.

Not long after she returned to Jackson in , her beloved father was stricken with leukemia, and, despite the desperate efforts of his wife to save him, he passed away quite quickly. For the next few years Welty earned an income by fulfilling various responsibilities at a local radio station and by reporting the Jackson social scene for a Memphis newspaper.