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Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an award-winning American author and photographer who wrote about the American South.

Eudora Welty.

Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi and lived a significant portion of her life in the city's Belhaven neighborhood, where her home has been preserved. She was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Columbia University's business school. While at Columbia University, she also was the captain of the women's polo team.

During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration, a job that sent her all over the state of Mississippi photographing people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place and Photographs.

The headstone of Eudora Welty at Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi.

Welty's true love was literature, not photography, and she soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, Death of a Traveling Salesman, appeared in 1936. Her work attracted the attention of Katherine Anne Porter, who became a mentor to her and wrote the foreword to Welty's first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, in 1941. The book immediately established Welty as one of American literature's leading lights and featured the legendary short stories A Worn Path, Why I Live at the P.O., and Petrified Man, all of which have been included in many short story anthologies and literature text books through the years. The Canadian writer Alice Munro said that Welty's A Worn Path was perhaps the most perfect short story ever written^{[citation needed]}. The volume also includes such well-regarded stories as "Powerhouse", "Clytie", "A Piece of News", and the title story. In 1992, Welty was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story. Ms. Welty was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987.

Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. In her later life, she lived near Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. Despite her fame,she was still a common sight among the people of Jackson; you could greet her at the grocery store, see her on a walk, or run into her just about anywhere that any other person would go.

Eudora Welty died of pneumonia in Jackson, Mississippi, at the age of 92, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson.

• A Worn Path 1940
• A Curtain of Green 1941
• The Robber Bridegroom (novella) 1942
• The Wide Net and Other Stories 1943
• Music From Spain 1948
• The Golden Apples 1949
• Selected Stories 1954
• The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories 1955
• Thirteen Stories 1965
• The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty 1980
• Moon Lake and Other Stories 1980
• Morgana: Two Stories from The Golden Apples 1988

• Delta Wedding 1946
• The Ponder Heart 1954
• The Shoe Bird (juvenile) 1964
• Losing Battles 1970
• The Optimist's Daughter 1972

• Three Papers on Fiction (criticism) 1962
• The Eye of the Story (selected essays and reviews) 1978
• One Writer's Beginnings (autobiography) 1983
• The Norton Book of Friendship (editor, with Roland A. Sharp) 1991
• 3 Minutes or Less (selected essay) 2001

• Eudora Welty House

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