One Writers Beginnings, Eudora Welty
One Writers Beginnings, Eudora Welty
List: $14.99 | Sale: $10.50
Club: $7.49

One Writer's Beginnings

Author: Eudora Welty

Narrator: Eudora Welty

Unabridged: 3 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/05/2021


Synopsis

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s timeless lectures that became a New York Times bestselling classic regarded as a “profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write” (Los Angeles Times).

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. Everyday sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father’s coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia backcountry that became a metaphor for her mother’s sturdy independence, Eudora’s earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture.

In her vivid descriptions of growing up in the South—of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the children they taught—she recreates the vanished world of her youth with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction, capturing “the mysterious transfiguring gift by which dream, memory, and experience become art” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

Part memoir, part exploration of the seeds of creativity, these lectures recorded at Harvard in 1983 offer a rare glimpse into the Mississippi childhood that made Eudora Welty the acclaimed and important writer she would become.

About Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty (1909­–2001), one of the most important and beloved writers of the 20th century and master of the short story form, was born and lived most of her life in Jackson, Mississippi. The author of multiple essays, novellas, and novels, including The Optimist’s Daughter and Delta Wedding. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Order of the South, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, among many other literary awards. She was also the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Pam on April 25, 2024

There are many very good reviews of this book on Goodreads so I don’t need to add a lot in this review. Eudora Welty is a wonderful Southern writer whose life spanned much of the 20th century. This writer’s memoir (part autobiography/part her life in writing) is a story of her happy family life in s......more

Goodreads review by Lawyer on December 09, 2015

One Writer's Beginnings: Eudora Welty's Very Private Memoir I take literary pilgrimages to Mississippi to very different worlds. There is the world of William Faulkner in the hard scrabble land around Oxford, New Albany, Holly Springs, and Pontotoc. Then there is Jackson, Mississippi. Considerably mo......more

Goodreads review by Sue on December 13, 2015

As my initial comment on re-reading One Writer's Beginnings, I will say that I have found Welty's thoughts on family (and especially her parents' influences) and her personal theories of writing even more interesting on this second reading. So many sections seemed to jump out for me---her relationsh......more

Goodreads review by boxer_dogs_dance on March 04, 2025

Fair warning for anyone who is primarily interested in Welty's perspective on writing and development as a writer. The vast majority of that content is in the final third of the book. This book tells the story of Welty's childhood and coming of age. It is written with vivid description and deft narr......more

Goodreads review by Shirley on September 14, 2013

I've read this book three times. Once as a young professor with an admiration for Eudora Welty. Next as a beginning memoirist myself. Last week I read the book again as a professor teaching memoir to honors students. Every reading has allowed me to notice new things about Welty. This time I focused o......more