Eudora Welty was the longest surviving member of the trio of Southern Gothic writers. She died in July of 2001. Following is a brief biography of her life from the official Eudora Welty newsletter:
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909, and attended the public schools there. She published several pieces in magazines for children before she reached her teens. From 1925-1927, she attended Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW, or the "W" as it was called) in Columbus, but transferred for her final two years of college to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She spent an academic year in New York City, studying at the Columbia University School of Business but attending lectures, plays, concerts, and art exhibitions as well. The untimely death of her father in 1931 prompted her return to Jackson, where she worked for the local radio station and wrote Jackson and Delta society news for the Memphis, Tennessee, Commercial Appeal, a major newspaper for northwest Mississippi. In 1935 and 1936, she worked for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program the Works Progress Administration (WPA), serving as a "junior publicity agent" and traveling to many parts of Mississippi to promote road building, new airstrips, canning factories, and other efforts to bring economic progress to poor and remote rural areas of the state. In 1936 she published her first important short story, and from that time onward her writing career expanded and found considerable success, as the list of book publications below indicates. All of Welty's writing is the product of a determined shaping imagination and a deep love and understanding for the power of carefully chosen language to evoke charactersin dramatic motion. Her stories are very much created by her own art out of materials she found and was touched by, material assembled by the artist's eye.
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