Eudora Welty’s legacy honored

JACKSON, Miss. | Almost any intro-to-literature college textbook can give an overview of Eudora Welty’s work, of how most of her novels and short stories were set in the 20th-century American South but captured a global audience with their intricately developed characters and complex exploration of universal emotions.

Miss Welty remains an iconic presence in her Mississippi hometown, nearly eight years after she died at age 92. Her works have been translated into 40 languages, said her biographer and friend, Suzanne Marrs.

Friends and fans gathered in Jackson last week to celebrate the centennial of Miss Welty’s birth with parties, lectures and concerts.

“She was probably not as appreciated … as she should have been during her lifetime, but I think now it is obvious she was one of the great writers of the 20th century,” said longtime friend William Winter, who was Mississippi’s governor from 1980-84. Miss Welty was an unabashed Democrat in a conservative state. Friends recall that she kept a Winter bumper sticker on her Oldsmobile for years after he was elected.

Miss Welty won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her short novel “The Optimist’s Daughter.”

Many in Jackson remember the author as an unassuming woman who could be seen pushing her own cart at a local grocery store, the Jitney 14, even after she was an established writer.

Miss Welty’s friends remember her as a natural raconteur who enjoyed an occasional nip of Maker’s Mark bourbon to help the conversation flow. She was a voracious reader and had eclectic musical tastes that encompassed everything from Sergei Rachmaninoff to Fats Waller.

Miss Welty was born on April 13, 1909, to a middle-class family in Jackson. Her mother had a talent for photography. Her father worked for an insurance company and in 1924 oversaw construction of the city’s first skyscraper, the 10-story Lamar Life building across from the governor’s mansion.

Miss Welty spent most of her life in Jackson — minus the extended periods she spent in New York City and San Francisco. She did most of her writing in her hometown, a place she found familiar and frustrating. Especially during the first two-thirds of her life, Mississippi was torn by a strict code of racial segregation in which whites held the economic and political power.

During the Depression, Miss Welty traveled her home state extensively as a junior publicist for the Works Progress Administration. When she was off duty, she often crossed society’s color barriers and photographed black and white people while they worked, shopped and relaxed.

Miss Welty was disgusted by racism and wrote one of her most powerful works in response to the June 12, 1963, assassination of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers. He was killed by a sniper in the driveway of his home, four miles from where Miss Welty lived. The story — “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” — explored the mind-set of a bigot who would commit such a murder. It was published in July 1963 in the New Yorker.

Her work is often overshadowed by that of other novelists who were roughly her contemporaries, including William Faulkner and Richard Wright. Miss Welty socialized with Mr. Faulkner, nearly 12 years her senior, on several occasions. She never met Mr. Wright; although their childhood homes were only a few miles apart in Jackson, Miss Welty and Mr. Wright occupied vastly different worlds because she was white and he was black. He spent his final years in Paris.

Miss Welty’s fiction was rooted in a particular place and time but is still relevant, said Pearl McHaney, an English professor at Georgia State University. “The biggest misconception is that, ’She’s an old white lady from Mississippi, and why would we read her today?’” said Miss McHaney, who’s president of the Eudora Welty Society, an academic group that promotes studies of the author’s work.