1. The author, Eudora Welty, was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi (the state’s capital.
2. Her parents who valued reading purchased books for their children.
3. Welty first attended a womens’ college in Mississippi: but she graduated from the University of Wisconsin.
4. In 1936 Welty published her first short story “Death of a Traveling Salesman:” more- over she followed it quickly with two collections of stories.
5. “Place”, Welty once said, “has the most delicate control over character; she then discussed the role of setting in the fiction of William Faulkner, Emily Brontë and Thomas Mann.
6. Welty’s characters sometimes labeled with the word grotesque evoke the atmosphere of the small-town South.
7. Among the memorable characters in Welty’s stories are these; Phoenix Jackson, in “A Worn Path,” Leota, in “Petrified Man,” and Marian, in “A Visit of Charity”.
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After reading the story A Worn Path, some readers have asked, “Is Phoenix’ grandson really dead”?
9. Another character the narrator of “Why I Live at the P.O.”, vividly describes her eccen- tric relatives.
10. Welty’s novel “The Optimist’s Daughter” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. (It’s main char- acters resemble her parents)
11. Her ancestors on her fathers side who were of German Swiss background) arrived in America before the Revolutionary War.
12. Weltys’ father said that “he was not interested in ancient history.”
13. However her father did keep in touch with his own father, Jefferson Welty Esquire, for whom he had a deeply felt regard.
14. “It was the only use my father made of the word he saved it for his father,” wrote Welty in her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings.
15. As a result Welty always held the term Esquire in great respect.
16. After her father died an English Welti, who spelled his name with an i told Welty about her