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Eudora Welty: A Biography, by Suzanne Marrs
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Eudora Welty's works are treasures of American literature. When her first short-story collection was published in 1941, it heralded the arrival of a genuinely original writer who over the decades wrote hugely popular novels, novellas, essays, and a memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, that became a national bestseller. By the end of her life, Welty (who died in 2001) had been given nearly every literary award there was and was all but shrouded in admiration.
In this definitive and authoritative account, Suzanne Marrs restores Welty's story to human proportions, tracing Welty's life from her roots in Jackson, Mississippi, to her rise to international stature. Making generous use of Welty's correspondence-particularly with contemporaries and admirers, including Katherine Anne Porter, E. M. Forster, and Elizabeth Bowen-Marrs has provided a fitting and fascinating tribute to one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.
- Sales Rank: #1079947 in Books
- Published on: 2006-10-09
- Released on: 2006-10-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.68" w x 5.31" l, 1.42 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 672 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Dorothy AllisonI was seduced by Eudora Welty. I had every reason to distrust her, as I had distrusted Faulkner—both of them products of the middle-class South I disdained in preference for what I called the real South—the queer and working-class writers I took as my own models. Part of my distrust came from all those photographs—those neat, well-put-together, backcover shots.You need a good biography to counter the myths perpetrated by those photos, a good biography that sends you back to the actual work, the novels and short stories and essays. Suzanne Marrs has written that biography of Eudora Welty—a book that debunks the myths and quotes enough of the writing to make you hunger for the novels and stories. Marrs takes pains to refute the image of Eudora as a perfect "Southern Lady," a "nearly petrified woman holding to the mores of the Southern past"—myths strengthened and reinforced by Ann Waldron's 1998 biography and the lengthy New Yorker article by Claudia Roth Pierpont. That Welty knew how she was imagined, and that she had the grace—a deep, resonant well of humor, insight and talent—is made plain.Here we have the necessary counterpoint: not Eudora the pitiful old maid nor Eudora the homely, the victim of her domineering mother, but the real deal: Eudora the writer who loved fiercely but never married, falling in love first with a man who, though he loved her, would always love men more, and then with a man who was not only married and faithful to his wife, but doomed by Alzheimer's and early death to recede from the genuine affection he felt for her. The story of Eudora Welty's long relationship with Kenneth Millar, who wrote detective fiction under the pen name Ross Macdonald, has the weight of genuine tragedy. Both of them believed in the magic of fate, their meeting at the Algonquin Hotel in 1971 and the years of twice-monthly correspondence that followed. One of the revelations of the biography is that Ken Millar and Eudora were in each other's company only about six weeks in total. Though Eudora tried, she was never able to complete any of the stories she began on the subject. For all the emphasis on Eudora's loneliness, her everyday life contained a rich and sustained circle of friends who were some of the great writers and public figures of the 20th century. Yes, she had her mother and cared for her deeply, but she had also friends who valued what she did and sustained her and it. Think of Katharine Anne Porter , Elizabeth Bowen, Reynolds Price, Robert Penn Warren, Stephen Spender and Anne Tyler. "You love Eudora as a friend," Ken Millar once said to Reynolds Price. "I love her as a woman." The rest of us get to love her as a writer, and with this biography—the whole of her extraordinary world. Dorothy Allison is the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller and the forthcoming She Who (Riverhead).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From 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.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Eudora Welty, a beloved and critically respected American fiction writer, died in 2001, and her only document of her life story is her best-selling memoir, One Writer's Beginning 1984). As edifying and supple as that book is, it is now time for a responsible biography, one that will hold up as definitive for many years to come. That need is filled by this comprehensive, compassionate account by a Welty friend and scholar and the author of the standard critical study of the Welty oeuvre, One Writer's Imagination (2002). Marrs' presentation is straightforward and unembellished, much like Welty herself. The Welty that graciously steps from these pages is hardly the provincial old maid she was often thought to be; she is instead a sophisticated, cosmopolitan woman who did indeed venture beyond the limits of her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi--in fact, she counted New York City as her second home and so tired of conservative Mississippi politics in the civil rights era that she considered leaving the state altogether. Although not as beautifully rendered as many literary biographies, this one is nevertheless important for solidly establishing the life record of a major writer. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
A well-researched, engaging look at the life of a powerful American voice
By Bookreporter
More than 60 years since the publication of her first book, A CURTAIN OF GREEN, Eudora Welty's status as a major voice in American letters is unquestioned. One of the chief joys of her art is evinced in the ways her finely wrought short stories and elaborately patterned novels capture colorful characters whose depth and dignity are matched by a spirited, often unselfconscious zest for life and living. It is furthermore acknowledged that the range of men and women who people Welty's narratives offers consistent proof that "regional literature" is as varied as it is universal, that even the most geographically cloistered characters (think "Livvie" in the story of that name) are capable of feeling and sensing the same sort of complexities of the most sophisticated, urban-dwelling aristocrats who people Henry James's fiction.
With respect to the author, however, most scholars tend to dismiss Welty's emotional and active life as devoid of incident or color. In a widely read "Introduction" to the author in THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, VOLUME 2, for example, the editors insist that her "outwardly uneventful life and her writing are most intimately connected to the topography and atmosphere of the season and the soil of the native Mississippi that ha[d] been her lifelong home." Such logic assumes Welty sacrificed the chance of a fulfilling personal life in the service of her art.
Suzanne Marrs, the author of EUDORA WELTY: A Biography, insists that this is a reductive view that fails to consider the author's full engagement in matters of family, romantic love, travel, and politics over the course of nine decades. In a patient, well-documented, thoroughly considered overview of the writer's life, Marrs debunks the notion that Welty's existence was "uneventful"; and if, even after such a painstaking process, Welty's personal narrative seems tame in comparison to the high drama of her mentor, Katherine Anne Porter, or the intense personal trials of her contemporary, Richard Wright, Marrs's EUDORA WELTY amply documents the writer's full participation in almost every aspect of a long and fulfilling life.
Organized into 11 chapters, EUDORA WELTY first traces the author's sheltered upbringing by two well-educated parents who migrated from the north shortly before her birth; it then delves into key moments of the author's self discovery. (Marrs's careful, patient analysis reveals that Welty's talents weren't simply literary; her lifelong passion for photography began as early as the 1930s.) Just as Welty's formative years as a young writer led to the publication of her first and perhaps most celebrated book, she was confronted by the atrocities of World War II --- an event that affected her on a political and personal level. It is in the ensuing decade that we witness a passionate, albeit frustrated, long-distance love affair between Welty and longtime friend John Robinson. Exactly why this relationship did not progress into a physical one leading to marriage is, with a good deal of evidence, attributed to Robinson's ambiguous sexuality, a fact that he was painfully slow to realize and one that ultimately placed Welty, a longtime friend to many homosexual men, in a strained position with regards to same-sex couples.
Several other subjects are thoroughly considered from this period as well, including extensive travel throughout the United Sates and Europe and the author's prolific string of largely acclaimed publications that, from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, led to a conspicuous 15 years of creative silence. During that time, Marrs documents Welty's heavy involvement in Mississippi politics, her stand on hot-button issues, such as racism, and her earnest attempt to break writer's block through prolonged work on LOSING BATTLES, her most ambitious and fully developed novel, that ironically grew out of a short story.
By the early 1970s, Welty worked through her writer's block with another string of impressive publications, including THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize. But Marrs's EUDORA WELTY is not an in-depth study of the writer's work. (For this readers should consult the biographer's ONE WRITER'S IMAGINATION: The Fiction of Eudora Welty.) Instead, Marrs here considers Welty's fiction as representative of the writer's personal struggles. The brutal rape scene that concludes the story "At the Landing," the final fiction in Welty's short story collection THE WIDE NET, is read as a "misuse of power and violation of individual sanctity that Eudora associated with fascism and even at times with politicians more generally." Such readings are insightful and well-considered, but I often wondered if Marrs might go a bit further: in the previous example, the rape victim, Jenny, is first brutalized by a man who, though he "violates" her, still holds her heart. Is this perhaps a projection of her feelings about her frustrated passions for Robinson?
Marrs also considers a second romance in Eudora's life, this one with writer Kenneth Millar, a relationship that bloomed from a platonic, mutual admiration for one another's work. This romance, which appears to have remained unconsummated, was mutually nourishing for both parties until Millar's sad death to Alzheimer's. In addition to these romances, Marrs discusses Welty's close but difficult relationship with her mother, her fruitful correspondences with fellow writers, and her evolution from woman-as-letters to elder statesperson in the arts.
Far surpassing Ann Waldron's 1998 EUDORA, Suzanne Marrs's EUDORA WELTY is altogether an engaging, well-researched and --- to my way of thinking --- necessary read for any self-respecting Americanist and Welty scholar.
--- Reviewed by Tony Leuzzi
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Woman of the World Models Vigorous Aging
By Janet Riehl
Solid research by a top Eudora Welty scholar is coupled here with close friendship in the last 15 years of Welty's long life. Suzanne Marrs friendship with Welty gave her unparalleled access to papers and a wide circle of Eudora Welty's friends.
In addition to the text there is a delightful section of 16 pages of photos ranging from Welty's childhood through old age--including a few she took herself.
Welty emerges from the pages of Marrs' biography as a woman engaged in the world--not sheltered from it as the popular myth of her life suggested. Even during the years of her so-called Writer's Block, she traveled widely and worked hard to craft and deliver speeches at colleges and universities that are later gathered into essays.
I was particularly touched by the passages relating to her involvement in taking care of her mother in old age and of how she strove--ultimately not for publication--to transform her pain at Ken Millar's (aka Ross Macdonald) Alzheimer's.
Although she grieved as close friends died, Eudora Welty also seems a wonderful model for vigorous aging as she kept active, involved, tried new things, and kept a cadre of acquaintances of all ages in her orbit.
--Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful!
By Armchair Interviews
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909 and died July 23, 2001. She was a Southern woman and that simple fact was what initially brought her to my attention so many years ago. I so enjoy the Southern writer. And Eudora Welty is no exception. Welty is a critically acclaimed writer of essays, short stories and novels. Hers are the stories that I return to every so often, always finding something new in them.
Welty's 1984 memoir One Writer's Beginning was her own personal life account. And while that was interesting it is this biography that seems to fill in the blanks with substance; probably because the author had a distance Welty didn't. What I found most interesting is the author's ability to humanize this icon of literature. Welty was first and foremost a woman who though she had an extreme talent, enjoyed humor, loved deeply (even though she never married), had numerous friends (many who were writers), loved her mother (whom people thought dominated Welty) and thought of New York as her second home.
Welty was definitely not the "old maid" some thought she was. She fell in love with a man who cared for her but also was interested in men. She then lost in love with a married man who was stricken with Alzheimer's. But it was the long-term relationship with Kenneth Millar (detective fiction writer Ross Macdonald) that will make your heart skip a beat. They met at the Algonquin Hotel and corresponded with each other twice each month. They only spent a total of six weeks together over the years but they always believed that fate brought them together.
I enjoyed the small items in this book: that Welty admired Langston Hughes's poetry and that osteoporosis took six inches from her five-foot-ten height. Especially touching are the memories of the relationship with Ken Millar.
Marrs book is a complete, considerate and grand account of the life of an important American literary icon. It is a book that I will revisit just like her body of work. Armchair Interviews says her work, like her biography is something to be read, reread and savored.
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