Letter from Eudora Welty to Hubert Creekmore

Welty writes from London, England, regarding her travels in Europe. She discusses visiting Dublin, Ireland, and her views about Germans. She includes a poem and discusses a piece she wrote and published in Harper\u27s Bazaar, which she calls The Bride of Innisfallen.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/creekmore/1488/thumbnail.jp

Postcard from Eudora Welty to Hubert Creekmore

Welty writes to Creekmore in Jackson, Mississippi, to ask Creekmore to translate the French writing on the front of the postcard, which depicts a church and a pastoral scene.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/creekmore/1422/thumbnail.jp

Opening of Photography Exhibition

Photographs of Eudora Welty / Meeting Room/ Photographs by Milly Moorhead / Lower Galler

Letter from Eudora Welty to Hubert Creekmore

Eudora writes to Creekmore on the back of a Punch magazine cartoon regarding personal mattershttps://egrove.olemiss.edu/creekmore/1568/thumbnail.jp

Some Notes on River Country

By Eudora Welty University Press of Mississippi (Hardcover, $25.00, ISBN: 1578065259; Slipcase limited edition,$100, ISBN: 1578065631, 4/2003) “A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out,” Eudora Welty writes in the opening to her 1944 essay “Some Notes on River Country.” The University Press of Mississippi has matched that essay, long out of print, with thirty-two duotone pictures by Welty and others to create the new book Some Notes on River Country. For Welty, the spark of inspiration from Mississippi’s river country Natchez, Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, the ruins of Windsor, and the ghost town of Rodney fueled much of her fiction and shaped her artistic passion to convey a “sense of place.” In his afterword, editor Hunter Cole writes, “‘Some Notes on River Country’ documents her discovery of this terrain and of ‘place,’ which Welty came to recognize as the orienting spring of her fiction.” Originally published in Harper’s Bazaar, this piece evokes both the elemental terrain and notables who traversed it via the river and the Natchez Trace—Aaron Burr, the flatboatman Mike Fink, the villainous Harpe brothers, and John James Audubon, as well as assorted fire-and- brimstone preachers, bandits, planters, and Native Americans. Taking the reader on an imagined journey through river country, Welty combines the genres of travel narrative, character study, and geographical history to give a grand tour of the region. This brilliant portrait of a place is both elegiac and animated as she shows how much has changed, how much can never be recovered, and how much of the old river country remains in its contemporary incarnation. In this setting Welty discovered a presence and a sense of place that stimulated her artistic vision. “Whatever she deemed it to be,” writes Cole, “its pulsating call to Welty never ceased.” Eudora Welty, one of America’s most acclaimed and honored writers, is the author of many novels and story collections, including The Optimist’s Daughter (Pulitzer Prize), Losing Battles, The Ponder Heart, The Robber Bridegroom, A Curtain of Green, and The Wide Net. Three collections of her photographic work—Photographs, Country Churchyards, and One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression—were published by the University Press of Mississippi.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mwp_books/1306/thumbnail.jp

The Optimist's Daughter

180 hal; 21 c

Reading: Eudora Welty

In this audiovisual recording from Monday, March 20, 1978, as part of the 9th Annual UND Writers Conference: “The Mirror and the Lamp,” Eudora Welty reads “Petrified Man” and “Where is the Voice Coming From?” Introduced by Tom Royals

On William Hollingsworth, Jr.

By Eudora Welty University Press of Mississippi (Hardcover, $20.00, ISBN: 1578064872, 3/2002) Welty’s graceful, appreciative essay about one of the South’s notable painters. William Hollingsworth, Jr., and Eudora Welty were Mississippi contemporaries who began their careers in the arts almost simultaneously. Just as the Great Depression struck the nation, both were finishing their educations in big cities—Welty at Columbia University in New York, Hollingsworth at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago. This keepsake book uniting these two acclaimed Mississippi artists and their work gives the pleasure of encountering Welty as an art critic and of meeting an astonishingly talented painter she admired. In 1958, after seeing a large posthumous exhibition of his paintings at the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery, Welty wrote this critical appreciation. It appeared in the Clarion-Ledger, the local newspaper, and has never been reprinted until now. Accompanying Welty’s essay are full-color plates of eleven Hollingsworth paintings she mentions or to which she makes reference. An afterword puts the work of Hollingsworth and Welty in the context of time, place, and circumstance. A chronology shows how Hollingsworth was a rising star whose life was cut short. As young Mississippians who had been schooled away from home, they returned to Jackson during hard times but were afforded a serendipitous gift—a sense of place that became a resource for their art. Although both longed to connect with the mainstream of the art world in the North, Hollingsworth and Welty discovered the significance of regional roots. A great American writer, Welty had a career that lasted for nearly seventy years. Hollingsworth’s lasted for only one decade. He died in 1944 at the age of thirty-four. She died at the age of ninety-two in 2001. Two of his watercolors that she bought in the 1930s still hang in her home.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mwp_books/1245/thumbnail.jp

On Writing

By Eudora Welty Modern Library (Hardcover, $14.95, ISBN: 0679642706, 9/2002) Pulitzer Prize-winning author Welty (The Optimist’s Daughter; The Golden Apples; One Writer’s Beginnings), who died last year, was a master of the short story, of small town eccentricities, of dialogue and place and the messiness of human relationships—she was a writer’s writer. Now, seven of her essays about the craft of fiction, taken from 1978’s The Eye of the Story, are repackaged together in a little book that marks a welcome break from the myriad how-to-write-a-novel-in-six-weeks guides and good-natured but often ineffectual volumes of creative encouragement. In elegant and insightful investigations, Welty considers Hemingway’s moralizing, Virginia Woolf’s intellectual use of the senses, the “lowlier angel” of setting, the problem of polemical, crusading fiction and the novel as “an illusion come full circle” that “seems to include a good deal of the whole world.” There is some advice to be had—narrative pleasure can arise from authorial obstruction, for example—but by and large this is a book of fond analysis, addressed to the serious reader and dedicated writer. —Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. (from Publishers Weekly)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mwp_books/1246/thumbnail.jp

Stories, essays, and memoir

x, 976 p. : ill. ; 21 cm