Eudora Welty, prize-winning author, dies

Eudora Welty, prize-winning author, dies

Tuesday, July 24, 2001

By JACK ELLIOTT JR.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

JACKSON, Miss. -- Eudora Welty, the wise, meticulous writer whose loving depictions of small-town Mississippi brought her international acclaim, died Monday at 92.

Welty, who also was praised for her heart-wrenching photographs of poverty in Depression-era Mississippi, died at Baptist Medical Center. She had been battling pneumonia.

Welty, author of "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles" and "The Optimist's Daughter," for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, said fiction provided her with the most productive tool for analyzing human personality.

"I'm not any kind of prophet, but I think it's in our nature to talk, to tell stories, appreciate stories," she said in a 1991 interview. "I think you write about whatever's current. ... They won't be the same kind of stories, but they'll be about human beings."

She was adored by critics, fellow writers and even some 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 the 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."

Other works include "Delta Wedding" in 1946 and "Losing Battles" in 1971. "The Ponder Heart" and "The Robber Bridegroom" were made into Broadway plays. Her personal favorite was the 1949 collection "The Golden Apples," interrelated stories set in the fictional Morgana, Miss. 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.

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