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Thornton identifies two kinds of metafictions in Welty's works that testify to the author's confidence in the power of that particular form of fiction to achieve the results she desires. The first deals with literary issues such as language, fiction, readership, and authorship as they are embodied in the particular fiction. The other addresses the social subtexts, which carry the author's social message, or observations, buried beneath the surface story for the reader to excavate. By taking up major works from different stages of Welty's literary career, Thornton reveals the subtexts and, therefore, the author's ideas about the literary and social role of her own fiction. ... Read more

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Famous literary friendships such as those between H.L. Mencken and James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert and Ivan Turgenev, and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore are examined in this magnificent collection of stories, legends, poems, essays, letters, and memoirs that illuminate the breadth and depth of friendship in all its human complexity. ... Read more

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The Mississippi river country from Vicksburg to Natchez was a source and a setting for several of Eudora Welty's early stories and for her novel The Robber Bridegroom. Her eloquent essay about this region, reprinted here with a selection of her black-and-white photographs, is a reflection on the development and history of these lands in the old American Southwest in a time before and in the years just after the Louisiana Purchase.

Originally published in Harper's Bazaar in 1944, 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.

In Some Notes on River Country, a dreamlike meandering through the landscape in eloquent prose and evocative photographs, Welty's empathetic presence is felt. Taking the reader on an imagined journey, 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. The essay and photographs explore the Natchez Trace, Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Natchez, Rodney's Landing, and other locales, offering insight on their quirky denizens, their significant history, and their entrancing uniqueness.

In this setting Welty discovered a presence and a sense of place that stimulated her artistic vision and imbued her work forever after.

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. ... Read more

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Occasions is a celebration of the short works of one of America's most beloved writers. To mark the centennial of Eudora Welty's birth, Pearl Amelia McHaney has collected more than sixty pieces by Welty that are largely unknown and have not been reprinted since their first appearances in magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers.

The gathering includes one of Welty's earliest stories, Acrobats in the Park; a self-analysis of her art printed in the Twenty Photographs portfolio; a recipe for Aunt Beck's Chicken Pie served up in the novel Losing Battles; and a parody of Edmund Wilson's scurrilousNew Yorker review of one of William Faulkner's late novels. These occasional essays, tributes, stories, and comments will delight readers and reveal more of the genius of a favorite author deeply engaged with her people and their customs.

In these pieces Welty put pen to paper for just causes: electing honorable officials, selling war bonds, promoting reading and the arts. Her sophistication and insight resonate in tributes to Isak Dinesen, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy as well as in reviews of sculpture, painting, dance, and photography, and in her candid remarks about her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Optimist's Daughter. Her sly humor emerges in Women!! Make Turban in Own Home! a delightful parody of projects suggested in Popular Mechanics. Written between the 1930s and the 1990s, these fictions, essays, commemorations, reviews, and salutes reveal the sparkling imagination of a celebrated writer who continues her hold on a wide audience through these newfound pleasures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Just what was missing!
This is the book all Eudora Welty readers now want to read. It collects short stories, articles, letters... that never before appeared in book form and were so hard to find!!! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Mississippi in the 1930s
This is a collection of 17 short stories, with characters ranging from poor white trash and decayed gentry to traveling salesmen and musicians.Most of the settings are in small towns in Mississippi, apparently during the 1930s, although one story seems to be set in New York City.Most of the inter-city transportaion was by train, people had radios (if they had electricity), roads were unimproved, and many people were scratching to get by.

The stories in the book range from humorous to somewhat surrealistic.Most have dialogue between characters, but others seem to be narrative accounts.As in most collections, readers will like some stories better than others.Readers should be aware that the stories reflect social structure and language of the time period, e.g., some stories use the N word.
Some readers may find some of the stories offensive.

I particularly liked stories like "The Petrified Man," which is set in a beauty salon and could be used for a short stage play.It should be noted that Katherine Anne Porter wrote the introduction to this collection of short stories. ... Read more

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Eudora Welty (1909-2001), in her writing and in her conversation, had a dazzling and ironic wit. Many friends remember the laughter she always provoked through her sense of the absurd. Early Escapades explores the initial manifestations of her comic and creative energy, from the word poems of her adolescence to the promising parodies and caricatures she wrote and drew as a young adult. Reading the pieces and looking at her cartoons, we can feel the comic energy that swirled through her later writing, and see the beginnings of her satiric force.

Welty’s artwork includes pen-and-ink drawings as well as caricatures. The compilation also includes limericks, poems, essays, editorial pieces, and society notes written by the young Welty. The earliest example of her work here is a reproduction of a small handmade book she wrote and illustrated to entertain her brother Edward.Titled "The Glorious Apology," the book is a collage of parodied newspaper and magazine clippings that tell the rollicking story of one Fitzhugh Green, son of the "whispering saxophonist" Artimus H. Green.

Early Escapades offers a prelude to Welty’s mature fiction where her sharp comic sensibilities focused on deeply rooted issues: the ambiguity of relationships, the complex struggles for power in families and communities, the duality of people’s perceptions. Her comedic work is a trenchant commentary on the way we lead our lives. Whether through her writings or drawings, Welty created laughter from the painful condition of being human. Early Escapades shows how Welty’s art, even in its nascent stages, embraced the world’s marvels, chaos, and mystery with passionate sympathy. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more