PARA PAR@ ` ⌐TEXT ` ¢Welty, Eudora1909╨writerBorn in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909, Eudora Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women for a time before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, from which she graduated in 1929. She spent a year at Columbia University preparing for a career in advertising, but she evidently found the work uncongenial and soon returned to Mississippi. For a time she wrote for a radio station and for the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, and later she was a publicity agent for the Mississippi office of the Works Progress Administration. During that time she worked at the craft of writing. Welty╒s first short story was published in Manuscript magazine in 1936, and thereafter her work began to appear regularly, first in little magazines such as the Southern Review and later in such general circulation magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker. A collection of her stories, A Curtain of Green, was published in 1941. The next year her short novel The Robber Bridegroom, was issued; a second collection of stories, The Wide Net, followed in 1943, and in 1946 she published her first full-length novel, Delta Wedding. Her 1953 story ╥The Ponder Heart,╙ published in book form in 1954, won her the quinquennial William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; she was also six times the winner of the O. Henry Award for short stories and in 1972 the recipient of the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. ╥The Ponder Heart╙ was made into a Broadway play in 1956. Other books included The Golden Apples, 1949, The Bride of Innisfallen, a 1955 collection of short stones, The Shoe Bird, a children╒s book, 1964, Losing Battles, 1970, and The Optimist╒s Daughter, which won a Pulitzer Prize, 1972. In 1971 she published One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, a collection of photographs she had taken while touring the state as a publicity agent for the WPA, and in 1978 The Eye of the Story, a collection of essays and reviews. The settings and characters of Welty╒s novels and tales were usually rural or small-town Southern, and she used to great advantage her ear for dialect and her photographic eye for telling detail. She avoided, however, the Gothic strain to which Southern regional writing is liable and in her portrayal of character achieved a universality that attracted readers around the world. She was also popular as a reader of her own stories.In 1975 a musical version of The Robber Bridegroom opened on Broadway. Welty╒s later works include The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1980, One Writer╒s Beginnings, a best-selling collection of lectures given at Harvard University, 1984, Morgana: Two Stories from ╥The Golden Apples,╙ 1988, and Photographs, another collection from her work with the WPA, 1989. Among her many awards are the National Medal for Literature and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1980, the American Book Award, 1981 and 1984, the Modern Language Association╒s Commonwealth Medal, 1984, the National Book Critics Circle Award, 1984, the National Medal of Arts, 1987, and the Rea Award, 1992. She was named a Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 1987. Fstyl ` 6 ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ !I ╜ !I ╬ !I w 5¬ x !I ú !I ¡ !I !I ( !I ` !I p !I u !I !I ƒ !I ▒ !I Θ !I ■ !I , !I 8 !I â !I É !I 5¬ !I / !I @ !I H !I ` !I à !I Æ !I ¡ !I ╗ !I ╟ !I ▐ !I !I K !I ╜ !I ╤ !I ° 5¬ ∙ !I ¼ 5¬ ¡ !I ╩ !I ▀ !I
