Just as Welty’s writings were getting national attention, she was hit with family tragedy. Her first novel Delta Wedding was published in 1946.
Finally, in June of 1936, Eudora Welty’s career sparked with her first published short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” which appeared in a small magazine called Manuscript. “It took me all over Mississippi, which was the most important thing to me, because I’d never seen it … was the real germ of my wanting to become a real writer, a true writer” (Gunton 459). In an interview with Jean Todd Freeman, Welty told how she enjoyed her job. Welty’s job duties were writing newspaper copies and taking photographs of places after destruction, studying troubled juveniles, putting booths in county fairs, and interviewing various people. Next, she got a full-time job with the Works Progress Administration as a Junior Publicity Agent. The first job she obtained was a part-time job with radio station WJDX. Welty soon began looking for jobs in advertising and publicity. His death was a great loss to her and her family. In 1931, the same year that she returned, her father suddenly passed away. Welty commented, “For somebody who had never, in a sustained manner, been to the theater or to the Metropolitan Museum, where I went every Sunday, it was just a cornucopia” ( Conversations with Eudora Welty, Gretlund 459).Įudora Welty and Margaret Walker, Photo by Rick Guy/The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, MSĭuring the Depression, Welty returned to Jackson, MS. Indeed, Welty went dancing and attended the theater regularly. During the time Welty was in New York, she had a varied social life. Later, after she received her bachelor of arts degree in 1929, Eudora attended Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York and studied advertising. According to one source, she left MUW, and “Encouraged by her parents, she transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1927 where she became an English major and began a more serious and focused study of English literature under Ricardo Quintana and other professors” (VandeKieft 4).
After completing high school, Welty went to Mississippi State College for Women (now MUW) in Columbus, Mississippi, from 1925 to 1927. Welty attended Central High School in Jackson Mississippi, between 19. Perhaps the influence of her father, who came from Ohio, and her mother, who was a native of West Virginia, have made her a more universal-type writer. Although born in the South, some critics do not consider her to be a Southern writer. She also recalls reciting the alphabet along with crediting her father for giving her a strong meteorological sensibility at an early age. She explains, “You learned the alphabet like you learned your address and phone number in case you got lost” (DiConsiglio 4).
In fact, says DiConsiglio, “Books were so valued that once when the house caught a fire, her mother threw out volumes of Dickens before getting herself to safety.” Welty also remembers the importance of knowing the alphabet. Eudora, the oldest and only daughter of the family, recalls in her autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings the importance of reading in her childhood home. The house Welty’s family lived in was built by her father when he and his wife first moved to Jackson. Read photographer Mark Wilkins’s story of his day with Eudora Welty belowĮudora Alice Welty was born April 13, 1909, at the Welty estate on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, to Christian Webb and Chestina Andrew Welty.
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