Eudora Welty

by Suzanne Marrs

Eudora Welty: A Biography

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Southern Gothic, Southern, Books About Books, Female Authors

652 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Suzanne Marrs is the author of Eudora Welty: A Biography and One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty and is a recipient of the Phoenix Award for Distinguished Welty Scholarship. She is a professor of English at Millsaps College. "

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive biography by an a scholar of Welty and her works. She was given permission by the subject and allowed access to all her correspondence. The author was also a good friend of Eudora Welty for the last 20 years or so of her life. All of her fiction is discussed, how it was written, and when and where. Her life in Jackson, her family, her loves and friends and awards, childhood, youth, middle age, old age, death; it's all here, as you would expect.

But more than that, I came away with a different picture of an author whose work I love. She traveled extensively, knew everyone, lived for experiences and to laugh and have fun. She loved two men in her life, and they loved her back, but neither was available as a life partner, for various reasons. Her loyalty to her friends and sense of responsibility to her family, as well as championing young writers trying to make their way, took time away from her writing, but that never mattered. She was there when she needed to be.

The fact that she lived during a time when personal correspondence was an accepted way to stay in touch was a gift to any biographer, instead of today's world of texts and tweets and cell phones. I'm not sure how biographers of 21st century celebrities will cope, but I do know that Suzanne Marrs did a great job with the wealth of material she had to work with.

Eudora Welty was one great lady.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I heard mediocre things about this when it came out so I didn't bother, but I found it on a sale table so picked it up and found out for myself that it is mediocre.

It's useful for facts facts facts, and so it will become yet another one of those bios I flip through the index to find out what I want to find out. For instance in Ms Welty's case I'll look up Ross MacDonald to find out about their "romance" or extended epistolary flirtation or whatever it was, and maybe I'll look up individual books or stories to see what the author has to say about them.

A couple things I did learn from this book:

That Ms Welty didn't like Carson McCullers (no real reason given besides she had a cigarette cough).

That she spent 3 days with Henry Miller at the behest of publishers and that she found him unobservant and humorless and that she was offended that he offered to hook her up with his publisher of "pornography" so she could make a quick buck (he obviously misread the world of a sophisticated Southern lady).

That her "romance" around WWII with a man she intended to marry was entirely devoid of any accelerated blood flow, ie it was far from sex-based.

[Amy Talluto · Rating 2 out of 5]

This biography claims to finally do justice to the memory of Eudora Welty by dispelling the long-held impression that she was a meek, polite Southern lady who lived a sequestered life in Jackson. And in truth, she IS revealed to be a woman of the world -- well traveled and intellectual, frequently rubbing elbows with other esteemed authors, artists, critics across the globe. However, sadly, that is the only thing that is largely revealed of her character and life; we get an endless rundown of her social calendar and travel schedule. Nowhere are any clues to her complex mind, her struggles as a creative person (besides a dry reporting of long creative blocks that are unprobed and unexplained); there is no sense of her as a full person. The author was a Eudora Welty scholar and close friend to her late in life, but her high regard seems to have made her tentative in revealing the full person. Either that, or she is more scholar than biographer and just doesn't have the sensitivity needed to get to the heart of a person and bring her to life on the page. An endless slog of details and extraneous facts...a disappointment.

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those biographies that is so detailed it might be for hard core fans only. Having met (and liked very much!) the author, listened to Eudora's voice reading two of her autobiographies, visited her home in Jackson, and reading the book about her garden - well maybe I am hard core.

Eudora traveled, loved, wrote, read, taught, and was a passionate, wonderful person whom I admire. Now I need to read more of her work as I have barely scratched the surface.

[Sidik Fofana · Rating 4 out of 5]

SIX WORD REVIEW: A judicious biography of great integrity.

[Bookmarks Magazine]

The critics left us with decidedly mixed reviews. On the one hand, they were thrilled to peek inside the life of a writer so beloved and enigmatic. Marrs, who teaches at Millsaps College in Jackson, provides a welcome book in part because it replaces Ann Waldron's unauthorized biography, Eudora (1998). Yet too often Marrs loses the forest for the trees, recording the endless specifics of Welty's social calendar but not uncovering the meaning of her friendships. Still, she provides new insight into Welty's romances and adventurous nature. Another enterprising writer will no doubt undertake another biography in 2021, when Welty's correspondence with her mother, now sealed, is opened. Perhaps that next biography will give more texture to Welty's complex life.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[MD · Rating 1 out of 5]

Eudora Welty's fiction is rich and nuanced, brave for a female writer of her time. As an avid reader and admirer of her work, she never seemed to me -in spite of all outward appearances to the contrary- conventional or boring. Her correspondence with Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald and William Maxwell I've read with great enjoyment...

And then I read (with great anticipation) Ms. Marrs' biography of Ms. Welty.

The format is terrible, and Ms. Marrs' writing leaves a lot to be desired. She tells Ms. Welty's story in a benevolently gossipy tone as if she's telling the whole standing on your porch, casserole in hand, while rushing out to a Tupperware party she's hosting. You can't help feeling that she's left something on the stove, and if you don't return the casserole dish promptly she will be sorely disappointed and never bring you another unless it's in a disposable baking pan from the Kroger.

There is little depth to Ms. Welty in this portrait. Aside from garnering "devoted" friendships like others gather burrs as they walk through a field, Ms. Welty seems to be superficial in all her emotions. Perhaps, Ms. Marrs muses, she just felt much too deeply to really process anything other than in her writing. In the same paragraph she will talk of the terrible loss of a dear, close, intimate friend like no other in Eudora's life, and a sentence later Eudora is helped out of the sadness of said event by a happy occurrence where her brilliance as a writer is recognized with an award, or another devoted friend's presence sweeps away any sense of loss she might have felt.

This is basically Eudora Welty's travelogue along 92 years on this Earth. Her love for Jackson, Mississippi, and her garden (which, to this day, is a site I would have loved to visit some time), cannot seem to hold her at home long enough to be there except to have the house painted or replacing the furnace.

The format is terribly confusing. One moment it's 1974, and suddenly we go back to 1971 and we start over again. Out of nowhere, people from Eudora's life appear in the middle of a sentence and it takes a moment to realize who they are because Ms. Marrs (who knew some of these people and interacted with them) sees fit to refer to them in the same colloquial chatty manner that she would have in conversations with Ms. Welty. To those of us who have not really had the pleasure of meeting any famed author, sudden references -out of nowhere- about this or that person, without mentioning their full name first, can be confusing.

Nothing seems fully formed about this book. Some paragraphs give the impression of being written for a college paper, and most of it skirts the fact that Ms. Welty was human and elevates her to near sainthood by stripping her of anything more than "irritation", "annoyance", or "frustration." The one instance in which she truly addresses (in writing to William Maxwell) the subject of depression is barely touched upon, and off she goes on her next jaunt to a museum, play, concert, dinner party, or reunion filled with laughter and enjoyment of her devoted friends.

Ms. Marrs recounted Ms. Welty's social and writing calendar but did very little to get past that first layer of creamy foam on the Fruit Float that she wants Ms. Welty's life to seem to have been. Perhaps it is because she got permission to write that she feels she must be gracious and protective, but in doing so she has robbed Ms. Welty's admirers of a greater understanding of where that wonderful body of work came from in the first place. The kinship between author and reader comes from the recognition of emotional and intellectual similarities; this is where Ms. Welty's focus on "confluence" comes from.

Ms. Marrs wants us to know that she is the only one who has access to all of Ms. Welty's documents, that she knows what others don't, and that we have to accept that she is the only one telling us the straight facts. This may be the truth, but it doesn't necessarily make Ms. Marrs the best person to tell Ms. Welty's life story to the greatest effect.

Skip this book if you love Eudora's work and don't want to feel deflated about the woman behind the fiction.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have struggled to understand Eudora Welty. Since I live in the South, I have tried to read some well known southern authors including Ms. Welty. But I don’t get her so I am hoping that this biography will help me understand her somewhat better. Having said that, here is what Ms. Welty herself thought about biographies:

” I’ve always been tenacious in my feeling that we don’t need to know a writer’s life in order to understand his work and I have really felt very opposed to a lot of biographies that have been written these days, of which the reviewers say they’re not any good unless they reveal all sorts of other things about the writer . . . . . It’s brought out my inherent feeling that it’s good to know something about a writer’s background, but only what pertains.”
Source: Introduction xii

The author of this book, biographer Suzanne Marrs, says:

I attempt to present Eudora Welty’s life as fully as possible by allowing many voices to guide me – the voices in her fiction; the voices in her letters to friends, editors, colleagues; the voices of individuals who knew her not as a marble statue, but as a living, breathing, changing, developing, witty, sensitive, and complicated personality. Over the course of her ninety-two years, Eudora engaged the world with all her powers and never retreated into a single, narrowly defined role. Openness to experience complemented her creative genius and helped her to produce some of the most memorable fiction of the twentieth century. She was not the contentedly cloistered “Miss Eudora” in whom so many believed or wanted to believe, but was someone far more compassionate and compelling: a woman and a writer with a “triumphant vulnerability . . . to this mortal world.”
Source: Introduction xix

Oh dear, from this, one might anticipate a non-critical effort from the author. Are we star struck yet?

I have not read that many biographies of writers, but I think that this one does not find the right balance between thoughtful analysis and mundane life events. Much in the book is based on the author’s access to letters, interviews with people who knew Ms. Welty and her own experience of being very closely associated with the author as a helping person and friend. Welty was interviewed and quoted extensively, especially during the last twenty years of her life (1980 – 2001). She also received many awards and nearly forty honorary degrees from colleges and universities. The book enumerates these events without going into much depth.

This book is like a travelogue. It takes you to a lot of places and shows them off but less often suggests why this or that event or fact is especially relevant. Not that Ms. Marr doesn’t try. Tying Ms. W’s life to the stories she was writing at the time is an especially interested aspect of the book. But it was only theoretically interesting to me since, for the most part, I did not know or could not remember the content of the story. I will admit that that is more my problem than the biographers. It made we want to follow along with my copy of Welty’s collected stories so I could read each one as it came up and make the connection. But at that rate I would never finish the biography! So, the bottom line is, if you have a lot of the short stories in your memory banks, it seems like this biography would be that much more interesting to read.

Maybe the biography has to be used as a reference book that you come back to regularly as you do your Welty reading. It is nicely linear with chapter titles that give the years covered. For me, I just don’t have the time or interest in making Eudora Welty that much of a project.

Ms. Welty worked and lived through the end of segregation in Mississippi. The 1960s was a violent period in the South and especially in Mississippi. Her contribution to bringing integration to her home state was meaningful and it is effectively chronicled here. I was impressed by the things she did as a writer and a speaker as well as an individual to further integration. She worked in the background through her fiction.

Suzanne Marr’s biography is detailed and readable. I was able to experience Ms. Welty as a real person who had a talent as well as living a life. Some think that she must have been a quiet old maid who lived in the family home all her life. That couldn’t be further from the truth. She was in a relationship for many years that at times seemed to be leading to marriage but ended unfulfilled. After that she had a very close relationship (but apparently not sexual) with a married man, Ken Millar, a writer who lived on the west coast. A good deal in the book is based on letters between Eudora and these two important men in her life. She never did marry but had a full life of close friends and professional associates. She did a lot of travelling and spent a good deal of time in New York City. Her interest in cultural and artistic endeavors kept her busy attending a whole variety of entertainment.

She was famous and sought after as a speaker. Most of the book covers time when she was well known since that was most of her life. She was successful selling her short stories to periodicals fairly early in her career. She nursed her mother through many years, sometimes having a hard time balancing her responsibilities to family and the requirements of her career. There were times when she had a dry spell writing; a notable period was for several years after her longtime agent died. She published no new fiction in the last two decades of her life.

The biography is full of trips that are listed continuously, probably since all the dates and places were easily located in her papers. This is an example of how closely her life is chronicled:

After Cornell, Eudora spent three days in New York, read at Barry college in Georgia, went to Washington for a National Council meeting, regrouped for four days at home, traveled to receive two honorary degrees – from Washington University and Kent State University – paused for two weeks at home (attending family parties and New Stage meetings), then went to Harvard for another honorary degree before flying directly to Santa Barbara.

Often the people she visited at each stop are included. Probably a little too much detail for most of us! You are certain you do not want to know who was at her house for dinner when she dropped the crab casserole on the kitchen floor?

This is a long and detailed look at Eudora Welty’s life from birth to death. There are references to what book or story she was working on at any given time. Her dry spells, especially toward the end of her life, and what she did to try to get back into fiction is interesting. In her 70s and 80s she was busy getting awards and doing readings and conferences, but she still tried regularly to go back to fiction. Her book The Collected Stories was published in 1980 during her writer’s block period. She did some autobiographical essays that became a book One Writer s Beginnings that was very popular book in 1983 and also wrote many book reviews. There is good coverage throughout the book that deals with Ms. Welty’s feelings when important people in her life died. Since she lived to be ninety-two years old, many of her close friends and associates preceded her in death.

This is a long book and it read it gradually as I read several other books, mostly less demanding than this one. The author writes about moments of great joy and great sorrow in Eudora Welty’s life but those events rarely come alive off the page. For me this is a three star book. I see it more as a reference book rather than a book to read straight through. It took some determination to get through it entirely. My ability to put down a book that does not capture me is limited. What I start, I most often finish. I am interested to see if the book accomplishes the goal of making Welty’s fiction more understandable to me. I need to go back to her short stories and see if it makes a difference.

[Lelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m grateful to have a biography of an author I admire deeply. There’s great information here, and it certainly seems exhaustive. It isn’t, however, particularly engaging. Suzanne Marrs has a specific agenda - to show to us that Welty was neither provincial nor racist. I prefer an autobiography that simply explores and reveals who the subject is without hammering home a point.

Marrs seems to err on the side of thoroughness at the expense of being interesting. She offers lengthy paragraphs with lists of names, along the lines of, “Eudora went to New York City and saw so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so.” Rarely does she include a funny anecdote from these encounters or a line of description gleaned from one of Eudora’s letters. It’s a little like reading someone’s day planner.

There’s a lot of repetition - the same short story is described multiple times; events that last for more than a year - the writing of Losing Battles, the long drought in Welty’s fiction writing - are mentioned over and over so every few pages we’re told Eudora still isn’t writing fiction, Reynolds Price is still worried about it.

There’s a lot of over-explaining. Marrs quotes Eudora and then explains what Eudora meant and how the quote proves Marrs’ point. That may be necessary in literary analysis, but it’s not required in writing about someone’s life. Marrs also tends to use the first sentence of each paragraph to summarize the previous paragraph. That might be required in a high school composition, but it bogs down a biography. It felt as if Marrs didn’t trust her readers to be intelligent enough to understand her - or Eudora’s - meaning.

The biography also left me with unanswered questions - some rather silly, but they niggle:
- The year Eudora was on the jury that selected the Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction - which book won? (I found the answer: Humboldt’s Gift by Bellow).
- Why did she have reservations about Pilgrim on Tinker’s Creek by Annie Dillard?
- What about her gardening life, which was a major source of joy but barely mentioned in detail by Marrs? Welty represents place so powerfully, partly by using plants to convey sensual details. Why wouldn’t Marrs talk about this?
- Also, I understand Eudora had a wry sense of humor, and often Marrs tells us “there was so much laughter” at a gathering of friends. Could we be let in on the joke?
- There seemed to be an undercurrent of discomfort with homosexuality - was that Eudora’s discomfort or Marrs’, or were they both ill at ease? Marrs says Welty and her romantic interest John Robinson were “separated by an ocean and by Enzo Rochigianni" who was John’s partner for decades. It seems like a cheap shot for no good reason. Marrs has presented no evidence that Enzo was at fault - only that John Robinson being gay, couldn’t commit to the loving marriage Eudora wanted.
- Why use quotations from Emerson and Tennyson for chapter titles instead of quotations from Welty herself?

I know one biography can’t answer every question, and understandably Marrs followed her own inclinations as she chose the stories and information to include, but the feeling I had as I finished this was that Marrs found it difficult to represent objectively a person she considered a personal friend.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daughter, sister, aunt, friend, girlfriend, lover, writer, photographer, critic, teacher, advisor...just a few of the roles Eudora Welty, a most dignified woman of the 20th century played. Loyal, disciplined, dedicated, supportive, funny, creative, adventurous....just a few of the adjectives to describe a talented writer. Suzanne Marrs has written an exhaustive biography of Ms. Welty, 579 pages excluding forward and bibliography, while at times is exhausting in its detail, creates an intimate relationship for the reader to Ms. Welty. By the time the reader gets to the last chapter it is as if the reader is losing a very good friend. This is not an analyses of Ms. Welty's body of work, though references to it and passages from it are included throughout the text. The author focused on "Eudora the woman, describing her routines and her travels, her friendships and enmities, her encounters with love and death, her responses to war and social change." At times the reader feels as though he/she is reading Eudora's calendar; Eudora was always so busy I kept reading to be introduced to a secretary but one never appeared. The reader learns about Eudora the professional: how she wrote, how she supported herself in the early years, how she was honored once she became accomplished. The reader also learns about the personal Eudora: the democrat, the mystery reader, her interest in Watergate and the Iran/Contra Hearings. Eudora's was a life well lived and one that provided much fodder to fuel her creative spirit, whether in Mississippi or abroad. When the fiction writing muse seemed to evade her, as it seemed to the second half of her life, she found many other ways to fill her days and the time she spent traveling, teaching, sharing how she did what she did, while many of her friends felt robbed her of time she should have spent writing, endeared her to many to be writers and professors of literature. While Ms. Welty was a very private person, always sensitive to protecting the privacy of those she loved, she shared that which she felt contributed to making the world, particularly that of writers, a better place. I am new to Eudora Welty and concluded this book with many mixed feelings: I can't believe it has taken me so long to discover her and her writing; I am glad I have discovered her finally; I want to read more of her work, fiction and nonfiction; I want to revisit her home in Mississippi. Ms. Marrs was fortunate to have met and become a friend of Ms. Welty and from that friendship she has written a book that allows all of us to claim Ms. Welty as a friend.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed getting to know Eudora Welty; I had issues with this biography, which is sometimes insightful but more often becomes a list of trips taken and novels written.

Suzanne Marrs is, I think, too close to her subject, a friend for 15 years. She seems to have trouble looking at situations -- such as Welty's decade-long emotional affair with mystery writer Ross MacDonald -- objectively, instead reflexively absolving Welty of any wrongdoing (painting MacDonald's wife as a bit of a shrew in the process). Marrs makes her portrait of Welty a soft-focus one, and in so doing robs us of much of Welty's nuance and complexity.

Welty's correspondence with her mother is to be opened next year, and that offers an opportunity for a new life of Welty by a somewhat more detached writer. I would love to see a biographer like Blake Bailey take on Welty's long and interesting career.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you want to know everything about Eudora Welty, this is your book. If you are looking for a nice quiet biography of one of America’s most-loved writers, it will be a long slog. I found it to be very detailed - too detailed - and the paragraph structure was difficult to follow. Paragraphs were way too long so it seemed like work to read it and not relaxing.

[Linda Gaines · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very complete biography by an expert on the writer and traveller. I'd read a later book done by Marrs which used all the corresponce between Eudora and the write Ken Millar(Ross MacDonald) that I liked better.
I share an April birthday date and her birth year was my mother's so she has always been a woman I have followed.

[Robin Yaklin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taking it slowly on this one. As a writer hoping to publish a first novel, I want to understand how others before me did it. For her time, she was one brave soul. Give me more!

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being from the South - and from a family from Mississippi in particular- loving Miss Eudora is a given. I have always marveled at her writing , her words, and her crafting of stories and narratives. I knew a fair amount about her personal life in general, but I found this book to be especially riveting.Suzanne Marrs does an excellent job linking together the pieces of Miss E's career, loves , challenges and triumphs without over grandizing this iconic acclaimed writer. She obviously did a grat deal of very detailed and thoughtful research to gain access to facts perhaps never revealed or little known. She treats her subject with respect - perhaps a bit too much at times. I felt there were perhaps topics that she purposley avoided but those may have been skimmed over becasue lackof concrete back up just as well. There is, however, a lot of detail here and a great deal of meat on these biographic bones that is fun chewing, especially if you are a Welty fan. I enjoyed the detail in which Marrs describes Miss Eudora's writing habits - taking the typewriter to the bed- no desk needed at times! She understood the deep and complex reltatonship with her Mother and handles it well and throughly. She covers the WPA years and Welty's photography efforts with as much effort as she does her writing. I enjoyed reading more about The Golden Apples and The Ponder Heart and the processes she went thru to see those pieces into a publication reality. Marrs explains her subject's concentration on editing again and again until completion. Welty's prose has a poetic lilt and her gift of language is explored in detail by Miss Marrs to great effect.
After reading this biography I have a better understanding of why Eudora Welty's work is so impressionistic and moving in a sensory capacity.
If you are a Eudora Welty fan and you for some strange and unusual reason have not read this book, please do so. It made me go back and read several of her stories over again and allowed me to gain new appreciation for them as I had snapshots now in my mind of Miss E typing these words and in most cases, re typing them many, many times. This is a book rich in detail and should be the definative word on this great American writer.

[Diane Webber-thrush · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good biography of a writer I admire. Marrs had access to all of Welty's correspondence and it allows her to paint a clear picture of Welty as a person and an artist. The biographer is a Welty scholar and was a devoted friend of hers in her later years. It is intimate and respectful--but doesn't shy away from painful episodes in her life (her two loves, both unrequited; her mother's long illness). Other biographers had drawn her as a homely old maid, to be pitied on some level for never having married or had kids. This pretty clearly pissed Marrs off and she's correcting the record. Welty had a full life, just not the expected one. Now I feel like rereading Welty's novels and stories.

[Courtney · Rating 1 out of 5]

I GIVE UP. The writing in this biography is horrific. The sentences run on forever; long, rambling quotes from Welty correspondence are included without clear connection to the text; paragraphs refuse to end; and so on. The author has completely lost the scope of the work in meaningless details. Such a disappointment.

[Mbkjconley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part of the book that chronicles Welty's development as a writer is very good. However, the latter part of the book in which Welty was no longer writing in any significant way is nothing more than a tedious listing of Welty's travel itinerary.

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're intrigued about Lady Belhaven, this is the book for you; it includes all the juicy stuff you always wanted to know and felt weird about asking someone about.

[Pooch · Rating 1 out of 5]

nonfiction
Biography
American Literature
Pedantic

[Amy]

One of the most comprehensive biography's I have ever read. And poignant, in that it follows Welty's life from childhood through death. Memorable.

[Shari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love Eudora Welty. Loved reading & learning about her.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written biography of a fascinating lady.

[Sebastian]

First Read: September 14, 2017