Books by Eudora Welty

Written late In life, "The Optimist's Daughter" is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and autobiographical short novel written that finds the author coming to grips with her father's death--and that of her own childhood.

A Depression-era comic masterpiece, E. P. O'Donnell's The Great Big Doorstep centers on the Crochets, a Cajun family who live in a ramshackle house between the levee and the Mississippi River. It has remained a literary and cultural classic since its publication in 1941.

Although she is eminent primarily as the prize-winning author of classic works of fiction, Eudora Welty is notable also as an astute literary critic. This collection of her book reviews manifests the connecting of her penetrating eye with her responsive intellect in forming sympathetic judgments of the books she reviewed.

The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog. Its real name was the Yazoo-Delta. It was a mixed train. The day was the 10th of September, 1923 - afternoon. Laura McRaven, who was nine years old, was on her first journey alone. Laura McRaven travels down the Delta to attend her cousin Dabney's wedding. At the Fairchild plantation her family envelop her in a tidal wave of warmth, teases and comfort. As the big day approaches, tensions inevitably rise to the surface.

First published in 1949, THE GOLDEN APPLES is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There's Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There's Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson.Eudora Welty has a fine ear for dialogue and describes each of the characters in incisive, haunting prose. '...in the South,' she says, 'everybody stays busy talking all the time - they're not sorry for you to overhear their tales'. Welty deftly picks up their stories to create an unflinching potrait of everyday life in the American South and offers a deeply moving look at human nature.

A reflective, poignant novel of independence and love from one of America's greatest contemporary Southern writers.