Fans mourn death, celebrate life of Eudora Welty

By Staff
Such stories, including those about the deaths of her mother and two brothers, led Welty to write in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Optimist's Daughter" that life is nothing but the continuity of its love.''
Fans worldwide celebrated Welty's life and affirmed their love for the author who also wrote such stories as The Ponder Heart'', and Losing Battles''  after her death at a Mississippi hospital. She was 92.
Accolades began pouring in as word of her death spread.
I think that Eudora Welty can be sure that the continuity of love people felt for her is a reality,'' said Suzanne Marrs, a family friend.
Welty, who had been battling pneumonia and hospitalized since Friday, was highly regarded around the world, especially in Russia and France.
France awarded Welty its highest civilian honor, the Legion d'honneur, in 1996.
She was also acclaimed for her heart-wrenching photographs of poverty in Depression-era Mississippi and won the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist's Daughter'' in 1973.
The funeral is scheduled for Thursday at 2:30 p.m. at Galloway United Methodist Church in Jackson. Visitation will be from 2 p.m.-5 p.m. at the Old Capitol Museum on Wednesday.
Welty was adored by critics, fellow writers and even musicians. Country star Nanci Griffith cited her as an influence and an incident from Welty's memoir, One Writer's Beginnings,'' inspired Mary Chapin Carpenter to write the song and children's book Halley Came to Jackson.''
She was extraordinary,'' said author and critic Elizabeth Hardwick. She had her own voice and her own tone and her own subject matter. There was no one quite like her in American literature.''
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison remembered meeting Welty decades ago.
She had these little round, piercing eyes that kept moving in her head. She saw everything,'' Morrison said Monday. What amazed me was how comfortable everybody was under her gaze.
There was a profound kind of intimacy in her writing that was not smart-alecky. She just understood people and revealed things about them very economically.''
In 1998, the Library of America published a two-volume compilation of her works, the first time an entire edition had been devoted to a living writer.
Unlike fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, she did not imagine her people as tragic figures living out the curse of a sinful past. For Welty, the present was drama enough, a time for gossip and family squabbles, for private journeys and mysterious passions.
Her characters included the likes of Clytie, a frustrated spinster who drowns herself in a rain barrel; Lilly Daw, a feeble-minded girl who falls in love with a xylophone player; Miss Teacake Magee, who sings at her own wedding; and a couple of deaf-mutes who suffer indignities.
I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself,'' Welty wrote in 1980.
She once called herself a natural observer, and to me the details tell everything. One detail can tell more than any descriptive passage in general, you know. That's the way my eye sees, so I just use it.''
Writer Shelby Foote, also a Mississippian, said no one who ever spent as much as five minutes in her presence avoided being extremely fond of her. … She had a childlike wonder she never lost.''
Welty was born in Jackson on April 13, 1909, and lived here almost all her life. She attended Mississippi University for Women, later graduating from the University of Wisconsin and doing postgraduate work at Columbia University in New York.
Early in her career, Welty worked for newspapers and radio stations and served as publicity agent for President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, the agency formed to provide work for people in Depression-era America.
She took her celebrated photographs of Mississippians as she traveled the state for the WPA, later publishing pictures of Mississippians washing laundry by hand, tending a bootleg still and slaughtering hogs.
She credited agent Diarmuid Russell with helping get her early fiction published. When he first offered to represent her, she recalled in an interview, I wrote back and said, Yes, be my agent.' He wrote back, Not so fast, how do you know I won't be a crook?'''
He got me into the Atlantic Monthly and that changed my life,'' she said.
Welty's first story collection, A Curtain of Green,'' was published in 1941 and contained some of her most beloved work, including A Worn Path'' and Why I Live at the P.O.'' Years later, the latter story, about a Post Office worker, inspired the developer of the Eudora e-mail program to name it for her.
Her first novel, The Robber Bridegroom,'' appeared in 1942.
During World War II, Welty wrote reviews on battlefield reports for The New York Times Book Review. She used the pseudonym Michael Ravenna''; an editor had complained a Southern woman, despite literary talents, was not an authority on the war.
Although the shooting of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963 inspired Welty's haunting story Where is the Voice Coming From?'', the author was criticized in the 1960s for not writing stories about racial injustice.
I think I've always written stories about that,'' she said in later years. Not as propaganda, but I've written stories about human injustice as much as I've written about anything. … I was looking at it in the human, not the political, vision, and I was sticking to that.''
One Time, One Place,'' a book of 100 black-and-white photographs published in 1971, focused exclusively on Welty's Depression era pictures. A 1989 book, Eudora Welty Photographs,'' features more than 200 pictures, some taken on her travels around the world.
Welty never married and dedicated her life to her work. She lived in the Jackson home that her father built in the 1920s, where she continued her writing.
During the 1980s, her writing was postponed as she traveled to London and dozens of American cities to accept honors, publicize her book of photographs and read from her stories.
I do enjoy the readings,'' she said in early 1991. But I have some things I am dying to write.''
In recent years, she made few public appearances. In May 1998, her alma mater, the Mississippi University for Women, gave her its first honorary degree, but she did not attend the ceremony.
Her doctor posted a sign on her door turning away fans seeking autographs. Welty added a handwritten apology, but it was reportedly taken as a souvenir.