The Pulitzer Prize-winning author sketches her early life and discusses growing up in the South and the effect of her family and surroundings on her work and personality

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About Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty

1909–2001

Biography coming soon.

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“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...”

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“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.”

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“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”

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