Eudora Welty

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes several of Eudora Welty's fictional works. The paper takes a specific look at her memoir titled, 'One Writer's Beginnings' from a perspective of historical criticism. This paper takes a look at Eudora Welty's Jackson, Mississippi upbringing, her home life and her early professional years as a photographer and writer during the Great Depression.

From the Paper:

" Instead, Eudora Welty's first paying job turned out to be "for the state office of the Works Process Administration [WPA] as a publicity agent . . . Traveling over the whole of Mississippi, writing news stories for county papers, taking pictures, I saw my home state close at hand" (Welty, One Writer's Beginnings, 1982, p. 84). As the article "Eudora Welty" (Wikipedia, May 15, 2006) also states, of the author's life during this period, "During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration. This job sent her all over the state of Mississippi taking photographs of people from all economic and social classes." As Eudora Welty herself further recalls, of her experience as a photographer, in particular, during these years of the Depression, "The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know" (Welty). In her video interview within The Writer in America Series (1980), Eudora Welty also shares, for the camera and the audience, one of her own favorite photographs taken for the WPA during that period, a black and white picture of three little boys standing in a crowd at a county fair in Mississippi. The little boys are all watching a magician who is "about to saw a lady in half", Welty explains. One of the little boys "believes"; another "doesn't believe", and the third one "is just beginning to wonder. That's what I love about this one, the three states" ("Eudora Welty", The Writer in America Series), the author says. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Choard, Geraldine. "The Ties that Bind: the Poetics of Anger in Eudora Welty's
• Why I Live at the P.O." Colloque Eudora Welty: The Poetics of the Body.
• Rennes, France. October 16, 17, 18, 2002. Retrieved May 29, 2006, from: <http://www. uhb. fr/faulkner/wf/pages/welty/article_chouard_03.htm>.
• ---. "Vision and Division in 'Kin' by Eudora Welty. The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 55. 2002. 247-255.
• "Eudora: How a Southern Writer Came to Lend her Name to a Computer Program," The Art Bin. Retrieved May 24, 2005, from: <http://art-bin.com /art/ or_weltypreface.html>.

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