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Eudora Welty: Complete Novels & Collected Stories (two volumes)

“Her supple, funny, gently judging voice is heard again to stunning effect throughout this indispensable homage to one of our greatest writers.” — Kirkus Reviews

Overview

Overview

In these two Library of America volumes, Eudora Welty explores the complex abundance of Southern, and particularly Southern women’s, lives with an artistry that Salman Rushdie has called “impossible to overpraise.”

Complete Novels gathers all of Welty’s longer fiction in one volume. 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. The richly textured Delta Wedding (1946), set against a backdrop of rural Mississippi in the 1920s, vividly portrays the intricacies of family relationships in the sprawling Fairchild clan and their Delta plantation Shellmound. Edna Earle Ponder’s unrestrained and delightfully absurd monologue 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) brings Welty’s imaginative gifts to the largest canvas of her career, rendering a Depression-era family reunion with mythic scope and ebullient comic vigor. The volume concludes with the Pulitzer Prize winner 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.

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. The stories of The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are set both in the American South and in Europe. The volume also includes two stories from the 1960s, the justly famous “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 and cogent discussions of literary form. The volume concludes with One Writer’s Beginnings, the sensitive memoir of her childhood, which became a surprise best seller on its publication in 1984.

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1985 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

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