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Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, & Memoir

Edited by Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling

“She is one of the great storytellers of the world.” — Los Angeles Times

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Eudora Welty, “A Curtain of Green”
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News Eudora Welty and William Maxwell: Letters formed a fifty-year friendship
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In this volume along with its companion, The Library of America presents all of the most significant and best-loved works of Eudora Welty. Of her own work, she wrote: “What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high.”

Stories, Essays and Memoir presents Welty’s collected short stories, an astonishing body of work that has made her one of the most respected writers of short fiction. A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941), her first book, includes many of her most popular stories, such as “A Worn Path.” “Powerhouse,” and the farcical “Why I Live at the P.O.”

The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), in which historical figures such as Aaron Burr (“First Love”) and John James Audubon (“A Still Moment”) appear as characters, shows her evolving mastery as a regional chronicler.

The Golden Apples (1946) is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. It was Welty’s favorite among her books, and she described it as “an experience in a writer’s own discovery of affinities. In writing, as in life, the connections of all sorts of relationships and kinds lie in wait of discovery, and give out their signals to the Geiger counter of the charged imagination, once it is drawn into the right field.”

The stories of The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are set both in the American South and in Europe. Also included are two stories from the 1960s, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”, based on the shooting of Medgar Evers, and “The Demonstrators.”

A selection of nine literary and personal essays includes evocations of the Jackson, Mississippi of her youth that is essential to her work (“The Little Store,” “A Sweet Devouring”) and cogent discussions of literary form (“Writing and Analyzing a Story,” “Place in Fiction”). The volume concludes with One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), the sensitive memoir of her childhood, which has become one of the most widely read of her books.

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: Stories, Essays, & Memoir is kept in print by a gift from Evelyn & Michael Jefcoat to the Guardians of American Letters Fund made in honor of the Eudora Welty Foundation.
Table of Contents

A Curtain of Green and Other Stories
Lily Daw and the Three Ladies
A Piece of News
Petrified Man
The Key
Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden
Why I Live at the P.O.
The Whistle
The Hitch-Hikers
A Memory
Clytie
Old Mr. Marblehall
Flowers for Marjorie
A Curtain of Green
A Visit of Charity
Death of a Traveling Salesmen
Powerhouse
A Worn Path

The Wide Net and Other Stories
First Love
The Wide Net
A Still Moment
Asphodel
The Winds
The Purple Hat
Livvie
At the Landing

The Golden Apples
Shower of Gold
June Recital
Sir Rabbit
Moon Lake
The Whole World Knows
Music from Spain
The Wanderers

The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories
No Place for you, My Love
The Burning
The Bride of the Innisfallen
Ladies in Spring
Circe
Kin
Going to Naples

Other Stories
Where Is the Voice Coming From
The Demonstrators

Selected Essays
A Pageant of Birds
Some Notes on River Country
Writing and Analyzing a Story
Place in Fiction
A Sweet Devouring
Must the Novelist Crusade
“Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead”
The Little Store
Preface to Collected Stories

One Writer’s Beginnings

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ISBN: 978-1-88301155-0 976 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 102 Library of America Series

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