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Eudora Welty
  • The Contemporary Reviews
  • Edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    31 March 2005
  • Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty's writing and photography were the subject of more than one thousand reviews, of which over two hundred are collected here. From the first, reviewers loved Welty's language and disparaged her lack of plot. Their eager anticipation for the next book is rarely diminished by the shock of reading entirely different styles of writing. Her work was admired even as it challenged its readers. The reviews selected for reprinting here represent the diversity of Welty's reception and assessment. Reviews from small towns, urban centers, noted fiction writers, professional reviewers, academics, and everyday readers are included. The comments of reviewing rivals such as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, Nation and New Yorker, when read side by side, reveal the nuances both of the reviewers and of the work of this important Southern writer.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney, Georgia State University
  • Book:
    Eudora Welty
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    31 March 2005, pp vii-xvi

  • Summary

    From the start of her career, Eudora Welty was praised and plagued by the dichotomies of being from the South but having a universal point of view, of being a woman yet writing short fiction comparable with the best of her day, of keeping her own literary circles without being unduly swayed by publishers or fashion. Nearly always, her work was admired for the individual, dense, rich style, yet, nearly as often, it was criticized for lack of plot and for complex, abstruse description.

    Remarkably, the reviews of Welty's A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941) identified the strengths and weaknesses of this first collection and of the writing that was to follow, stereotyped her writing for good and for bad, and found kinship with great writers and painters, American and foreign. Rose Feld, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, linked Welty's writing with that of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Kay Boyle, and Katherine Anne Porter, calling the short stories by these writers a “peculiarly feminine genre” with a “quality of mood which surrounds and gives meaning to the incident.” For the next forty years, reviewers congratulated Welty on the mood she created in her fiction while counseling her to build more plot. Louise Bogan praised A Curtain of Green for Gothic elements as fine as Poe's and for the details that recalled the writings of Gogol before concluding that Welty's success was limited to the Southern region.

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