In each case it has taken a biographer to complicate such images. Like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, the first two women to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Welty has been depicted as reclusive, asexual, imitative of male writers, lonely and unattractive.
She and the 20th century were one, just as Queen Victoria and the 19th century were one. Welty died just a few weeks before September 11, 2001. women writers who came of age in the early 20th century and were the first of their sex to win Pulitzer Prizes, become members of PEN, participate in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and attract multiple honorary degrees. She fiercely defends the Welty she knew intimately for nearly 20 years from earlier writers and critics who, in Marrs’s view, sometimes saw only the outline, not the real human being.īorn in 1909, within a decade of the Wright brothers’ first flight and the introduction of the Model T, Eudora Welty was the last of a breed of U.S. Marrs is particularly good at illuminating paradoxes-the personal and the political, the particular and the universal, the life and the work-all of them simultaneously simple and complex. Welty, her native Mississippi and her worldwide network of friends come alive in this telling of her life. Marrs’s account of Welty’s life locates her essential loves and sheds light on the national, local and personal issues that wove their way into her fiction and essays.
In the new biography of Eudora Welty by Suzanne Marrs the ingredients are all there. And revery.” But “the revery alone will do, / If bees are few.” To make a great literary biography it takes a great subject, a biographer’s understanding-and reverie. "To make a prairie,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “it takes a clover and one bee, /.