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Eudora Welty: Complete Novels

The Robber Bridegroom | Delta Wedding | The Ponder Heart | Losing Battles | The Optimist’s Daughter

Edited by Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling

“There is hardly an American writer alive whose motives are so pure and whose fiction rings so consistently with the sounds of real and felt life.” — Columbus Dispatch

Overview

Overview

Story of the Week Eudora Welty, “A Curtain of Green”
April 22, 2016

Save $25 when you order both Welty volumes together.

One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, Eudora Welty’s novels and stories blend the storytelling tradition of the South with a modernist sensibility attuned to the mysteries and ambiguities of experience. In this Library of America volume and its companion, Welty explores the complex abundance of southern, and particularly southern women’s, lives with an artistry that Salman Rushdie has called “impossible to overpraise.” In a career spanning five decades, she chronicled her own Mississippi with a depth and intensity matched only by William Faulkner.

Complete Novels gathers all of Welty’s longer fiction in one volume for the first time. In The Robber Bridegroom (1942), based on a Grimm fairy tale, legendary figures from Mississippi’s past, such as the keel-boat captain Mike Fink and the savage outlaws the Harp Brothers, mingle with Welty’s own imaginings in a free-ranging and boisterous fantasy set along the Natchez Trace.

The richly textured Delta Wedding (1946), set against a backdrop of rural Mississippi in the 1920s, vividly portrays the intricacies of family relationships in its account of the sprawling Fairchild clan—with their “family trait of quick, upturning smiles, instant comprehension of the smallest eddy of life in the current of the day, which would surely be entered in a kind of reckless pleasure”—and their Delta plantation Shellmound.

Edna Earle Ponder’s unrestrained and delightfully absurd monologue, superb in its capturing of the rhythms of country speech, shows Welty’s humor at its idiomatic best in The Ponder Heart (1954), a flight of invention culminating in a murder trial that becomes an occasion for exuberant comedy.

The monumental Losing Battles (1970), composed over fifteen years, brings Welty’s imaginative gifts to the largest canvass of her career, rendering a Depression-era family reunion with mythic scope and ebullient comic vigor.

The volume concludes with The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), a taut and moving story of a woman rediscovering the world of her childhood as she comes to terms with her father’s death. Often considered her masterpiece, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1972.

Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling, volume editors, are the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day and professor of English at Vanderbilt University, respectively.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Eudora Welty: Complete Novels is kept in print by a gift from James H. Duffy to the Guardians of American Letters Fund made in memory of Martha Duffy.

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ISBN: 978-1-88301154-3 1009 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 101 Library of America Series

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