Eudora Welty
Information about the author and her work is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_Welty
Get personal with Eudora Welty
During the Great Depression Eudora Welty was a photographer on the Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Mississippi, and photography remained a lifelong interest. She also worked as a writer for a radio station and newspaper in her native Jackson, Mississippi, before her fiction won popular and critical acclaim.
Other works by Eudora Welty
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by ISBN: 9780151189946Publication Date: 1980-10-29This complete collection includes all the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are forty-one stories in all, including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories. With a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.
What There Is to Say We Have Said by ISBN: 9780547376493Publication Date: 2011-05-12For over fifty years, Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, two of our most admired writers, penned letters to each other. They shared their worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, moments of despair and hilarity. Living half a continent apart, their friendship was nourished and maintained by their correspondence.
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Did you know?
The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Eudora Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South.
Discussion Questions
The Optimist’s Daughter: Readers’ Guide Developed by Lee Anne Bryan, Former Education and Outreach Specialist for the Eudora Welty House and Garden
1. The novel begins with Judge McKelva, Fay, and Laurel in an examining room, with Dr. Courtland determining what is wrong with Judge McKelva’s eye. Explain how this exchange sets up the characterization for all three main characters.
2. How does the confined setting of the hospital room during Judge McKelva’s recovery continue developing the plot and the characters?
3. How does the exchange between Dr. Courtland, Fay, and Laurel after the judge’s death reveal the social status of the characters?
4. In Book Two, as Laurel and Fay arrive in Mt. Salus, how does the conflict between Laurel and Fay intensify?
5. Who is Missouri? How does her presence add another layer to the social differences in the novel? What are the roles of other African-American characters?
6. Two surprising things happen during the course of Judge McKelva’s visitation. One, Fay’s family appears after she has told Laurel that they are dead; two, Laurel becomes upset about the recollections people are making about her father. How are these things related?
7. What does Fay’s family add to the novel? Describe their relationships compared to the ones Laurel shared with her parents.
8. After Fay is gone, Laurel spends the night in her mother’s room. What is Laurel doing? What is she experiencing?
9. That night, when Laurel falls asleep in the chair, she dreams of riding the train with Phil to Mt. Salus. What is the image that she dreams about? What does it mean?
10. A pivotal scene in the novel is the freeing of the chimney swift, the bird that was trapped in the house. What might this represent?
11. What happens in the final confrontation between Laurel and Fay over Becky’s breadboard? What realization, or epiphany, does Laurel have?
12. In the introduction to the Franklin Library edition, Welty writes that in The Optimist’s Daughter she wanted to focus on “the progression of human relationships. Their tensions act as the directing force; and the plot of the novel tests the movement and pull, with and against, the power and strength of kinship.” By the end of the novel, how many ways has she demonstrated this? Do you find this to be a compelling subject for a novel?
13. Another theme in the novel is the process of grief and how people react to loss in different ways. What are the different characters’ reactions? What do you find most true to your own experience?
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The Optimist's Daughter by ISBN: 9780679728832Publication Date: 1990-08-11This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Along in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.
Read A-Likes
Calling Me Home by ISBN: 9781250014528Publication Date: 2013-02-12Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis. Isabelle wants Dorrie, a black single mom in her thirties, to drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own, scarcely hesitates before agreeing, not knowing it will be a journey that changes both their lives. Isabelle confesses that, as a willful teen in 1930s Kentucky, she fell deeply in love with Robert Prewitt, a would-be doctor and the black son of her family's housekeeper--in a town where blacks weren't allowed after dark. The tale of their forbidden relationship and its tragic consequences makes it clear Dorrie and Isabelle are headed for a gathering of the utmost importance and that the history of Isabelle's first and greatest love just might help Dorrie find her own way.
The Almost Sisters by ISBN: 9780062105714Publication Date: 2017-07-11Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs' weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic novelist is swept off her barstool by a handsome and anonymous Batman. It turns out the caped crusader has left her with more than just a nice, fuzzy memory. She's having a baby boy. But before Leia can break the news(including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional, Southern family, her step-sister Rachel's marriage implodes. Worse, she learns her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Birchie, is losing her mind, and she's been hiding her dementia with the help of Wattie, her best friend. Leia returns to Alabama to put her grandmother's affairs in order, clean out the big Victorian and to tell her family she is pregnant. Yet just when Leia thinks she's got it all under control, she learns that illness is not the only thing Birchie's been hiding.
