One Writer's Beginnings

By Eudora Welty

Featuring a new introduction, this updated edition of the New York Times bestselling classic by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author and one of the most revered figures in American letters is “profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write” (Los Angeles Times).

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. Everyday sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father’s coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that became a metaphor for her mother’s sturdy independence, Eudora’s earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture.

In her vivid descriptions of growing up in the South—of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the children they taught—she recreates the vanished world of her youth with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction, capturing “the mysterious transfiguring gift by which dream, memory, and experience become art” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

Part memoir, part exploration of the seeds of creativity, this unique distillation of a writer’s beginnings offers a rare glimpse into the Mississippi childhood that made Eudora Welty the acclaimed and important writer she would become.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982152987

Eudora Welty

EUDORA WELTY (1909–2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and attended the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University (where she studied advertising). In addition to short fiction, Welty wrote novels, novellas, essays, and reviews, and was the winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Book preview

I

Listening

In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak grandfather clock standing in the hall, which sent its gong-like strokes through the livingroom, diningroom, kitchen, and pantry, and up the sounding board of the stairwell. Through the night, it could find its way into our ears; sometimes, even on the sleeping porch, midnight could wake us up. My parents’ bedroom had a smaller striking clock that answered it. Though the kitchen clock did nothing but show the time, the diningroom clock was a cuckoo clock with weights on long chains, on one of which my baby brother, after climbing on a chair to the top of the china closet, once succeeded in suspending the cat for a moment. I don’t know whether or not my father’s Ohio family, in having been Swiss back in the 1700s before the first three Welty brothers came to America, had anything to do with this; but we all of us have been time-minded all our lives. This was good at least for a future fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly, and almost first of all, about chronology. It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.

My father loved all instruments that would instruct and fascinate. His place to keep things was the drawer in the library table where lying on top of his folded maps was a telescope with brass extensions, to find the moon and the Big Dipper after supper in our front yard, and to keep appointments with eclipses. There was a folding Kodak that was brought out for Christmas, birthdays, and trips. In the back of the drawer you could find a magnifying glass, a kaleidoscope, and a gyroscope kept in a black buckram box, which he would set dancing for us on a string pulled tight. He had also supplied himself with an assortment of puzzles composed of metal rings and intersecting links and keys chained together, impossible for the rest of us, however patiently shown, to take apart; he had an almost childlike love of the ingenious.

In time, a barometer was added to our diningroom wall; but we didn’t really need it. My father had the country boy’s accurate knowledge of the weather and its skies. He went out and stood on our front steps first thing in the morning and took a look at it and a sniff. He was a pretty good weather prophet.

"Well, I’m not," my mother would say with enormous self-satisfaction.

He told us children what to do if we were lost in a strange country. Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon, he said. That reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation. Eventualities were much on his mind. In his care for us children he cautioned us to take measures against such things as being struck by lightning. He drew us all away from the windows during the severe electrical storms that are common where we live. My mother stood apart, scoffing at caution as a character failing. "Why, I always loved a storm! High winds never bothered me in West Virginia! Just listen at that! I wasn’t a bit afraid of a little lightning and thunder! I’d go out on the mountain and spread my arms wide and run in a good big storm!"

So I developed a strong meteorological sensibility. In years ahead when I wrote stories, atmosphere took its influential role from the start. Commotion in the weather and the inner feelings aroused by such a hovering disturbance emerged connected in dramatic form. (I tried a tornado first, in a story called The Winds.)

From our earliest Christmas times, Santa Claus brought us toys that instruct boys and girls (separately) how to build things—stone blocks cut to the castle-building style, Tinker Toys, and Erector sets. Daddy made for us himself elaborate kites that needed to be taken miles out of town to a pasture long enough (and my father was not afraid of horses and cows watching) for him to run with and get up on a long cord to which my mother held the spindle, and then we children were given it to hold, tugging like something alive at our hands. They were beautiful, sound, shapely box kites, smelling delicately of office glue for their entire short lives. And of course, as soon as the boys attained anywhere near the right age, there was an electric train, the engine with its pea-sized working headlight, its line of cars, tracks equipped with switches, semaphores, its station, its bridges, and its tunnel, which blocked off all other traffic in the upstairs hall. Even from downstairs, and through the cries of excited children, the elegant rush and click of the train could be heard through the ceiling, running around and around its figure eight.

All of this, but especially the train, represents my father’s fondest beliefs—in progress, in the future. With these gifts, he was preparing his children.

And so was my mother with her different gifts.

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 to be read to. My mother read to me. She’d read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story. She’d read to me in the diningroom on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with Cuckoo, and at night when I’d got in my own bed. I must have given her no peace. Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story. It was my ambition to have her read to me while I churned; once she granted my wish, but she read off my story before I brought her butter. She was an expressive reader. When she was reading Puss in Boots, for instance, it was impossible not to know that she distrusted all cats.

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 came 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.

Neither of my parents had come from homes that could afford to buy many books, but though it must have been something of a strain on his salary, as the youngest officer in a young insurance company, my father was all the while carefully selecting and ordering away for what he and Mother thought we children should grow up with. They bought first for the future.

Besides the bookcase in the livingroom, which was always called the library, there were the encyclopedia tables and dictionary stand under windows in our diningroom. Here to help us grow up arguing around the diningroom table were the Unabridged Webster, the Columbia Encyclopedia, Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, the Lincoln Library of Information, and later the Book of Knowledge. And the year we moved into our new house, there was room to celebrate it with the new 1925 edition of the Britannica, which my father, his face always deliberately turned toward the future, was of course disposed to think better than any previous edition.

In the library, inside the mission-style bookcase with its three diamond-latticed glass doors, with my father’s Morris chair and the glass-shaded lamp on its table beside it, were books I could soon begin on—and I did, reading them all alike and as they came, straight down their rows, top shelf to bottom. There was the set of Stoddard’s Lectures, in all its late nineteenth-century vocabulary and vignettes of peasant life and quaint beliefs and customs, with matching halftone illustrations: Vesuvius erupting, Venice by moonlight, gypsies glimpsed by their campfires. I didn’t know then the clue they were to my father’s longing to see the rest of the world. I read straight through his other love-from-afar: the Victrola Book of the Opera, with opera after opera in synopsis, with portraits in costume of Melba, Caruso, Galli-Curci, and Geraldine Farrar, some of whose voices we could listen to on our Red Seal records.

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him. The novels of her girlhood that had stayed on in her imagination, besides those of Dickens and Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, were Jane Eyre, Trilby, The Woman in White, Green Mansions, King Solomon’s Mines. Marie Corelli’s name would crop up but I understood she had gone out of favor with my mother, who had only kept Ardath out of loyalty. In time she absorbed herself in Galsworthy, Edith Wharton, above all in Thomas Mann of the Joseph volumes.

St. Elmo was not in our house; I saw it often in other houses. This wildly popular Southern novel is where all the Edna Earles in our population started coming from. They’re all named for the heroine, who succeeded in bringing a dissolute, sinning roué and atheist of a lover (St. Elmo) to his knees. My mother was able to forgo it. But she remembered the classic advice given to rose growers on how to water their bushes long enough: "Take a chair and St. Elmo."

To both my parents I owe my early acquaintance with a beloved Mark Twain. There was a full set of Mark Twain and a short set of Ring Lardner in our bookcase, and those were the volumes that in time united us all, parents and children.

Reading everything that stood before me was how I came upon a worn old book without a back that had belonged to my father as a child. It was called Sanford and Merton. Is there anyone left who recognizes it, I wonder? It is the famous moral tale written by Thomas Day in the 1780s, but of him no mention is made on the title page of this book; here it is Sanford and Merton in Words of One Syllable by Mary Godolphin. Here are the rich boy and the poor boy and Mr. Barlow, their teacher and interlocutor, in long discourses alternating with dramatic scenes—danger and rescue allotted to the rich and the poor respectively. It may have only words of one syllable, but one of them is quoth. It ends with not one but two morals, both engraved on rings: Do what you ought, come what may, and If we would be great, we must first learn to be good.

This book was lacking its front cover, the back held on by strips of

Reviews for One Writer's Beginnings

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.This short, gentle memoir hints at how the writer-Welty was formed. Its three sections (“Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice”) were adapted from three lectures she gave at Harvard University in 1983. They capture her sweet childhood; her extended family and life in the South; and her education, early writing and reflections on writing.As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

[melydia_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I confess, I have not read any of Ms. Welty's stories. The only reason I'd even heard of this book was because some famous author listed it as required reading for all aspiring writers. Having read it, I'm not entirely sure why. Sure, it's a lovely painting of life in early 20th century Mississippi, but besides making the point of "good writers can come from any background" there isn't much to be gained in terms of writing advice. So while I may recommend it as a descriptive and nostalgic memoir, I would not include it in my personal list of a writer's essential texts.

[jim53_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ms. Welty breaks her brief memoir into three pieces. The first two describe her family and upbringing, with emphasis on its effects on her thinking and chpoice of a career. She inherits her mother's love of books and reading; her sense of place is strong. In the final section, she reflects more on the differences between experience and memory, and how writing tends to reflect memory, in that its order is one of revelation rather than of linear time. A scene is a weaker construct than a situation, which gives the scene context. Very nicely written. Not a writing how-to or an exhaustive autobiography, but some interesting insights into the process of writing and how it is based on seeing and listening.

[gingermama-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sweet little gem of a book...

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked the second half much better than the first. I read this sporadically at lunch and this book didn't lend itself to interrupted reading. Learning about her life and life in the south was very interesting, especially how her parents both left their homes for a common place.

[penelopemarzec · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this interesting from a historical perspective, though it offered little as an instructional book on writing. It is a gentle look backward in time.

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The unassuming, delight-filled, unsparingly indulgent prose of Miss Eudora's fiction is surpassed in this expansion and revision of her Massey Lecture in the History of American Civilization, delivered at Harvard in 1983. For anyone unacquainted with Miss Eudora's literary output, I recommend starting with short fiction ("The Bride of the Innisfallen" is a good starter, followed by "Why I Live at the P.O."), moving on to her chef d'ouevre, the novel "The Ponder Heart"; this memoir, all 104pp of it, should come after one knows whether one is able to appreciate the particularities and glories of Miss Eudora's work. While I think she would appeal to any able-minded reader, I know from experience that her beautiful sentences sound like preciosity to some readers: eg, "Over a stronghold of a face, the blue hat of the lady in the raincoat was settled on like an Indian bonnet, or, rather, like an old hat, which it was." ("The Bride of the Innisfallen")This, to me, is equalled in English by Nabokov's terse clarity, and by little else; but it has been cited to me several times as unendurably cutesy or simply overwritten. I so completely disagree that it's hard to credit the opinion-havers with a shred of taste; however, there are tastes, and there are tastes, so I move on from my digression."One Writer's Beginnings" is told in a narrative voice much like her fiction; it is constructed like the linear tale that a life is when it is reflected on at leisure; and there are so many things in her history, from 1909 and her birth until her last entry in the lecture, a trip by train to New York during the Great Depression as a WPA junior publicity agent, that clearly formed a consciousness of time and place and rightness of things that she uses to such telling effect in her stories. An anecdote early in the book of her parents' morning routine of whistling and humming back and forth up and down the stairs phrases from "The Merry Widow Waltz" illuminates for me the means by which this shy, never-married lady "got" the signals of relationship that are so necessary to the parties in happiness. Another moment, the discovery of two nickels preserved in a hidden box, teaches me that Miss Eudora never felt any unmixed emotion (I won't tell that story, it must be read to be understood) and that is why "The Ponder Heart" is such a landmark in Southern ficiton.The death of Miss Eudora's beloved father in 1931 is simply too painful for her to go into; she elides the details and leaves us to infer her pain. It fits with her lifelong lack of interest in talking about herself, but it leaves the reader without an anchor in what had to be a turbulent passage in her life. I can't fault the lady for her reticence, but in this as in several other areas, it would have behooved Miss Eudora to have let others guide her in preparing these talks so as to answer more questions.Well, and therein the rub: It was the last thing she ever wanted to do, answer questions, and it's also why she wrote such marvelous stories, to answer them all unasked. Miss Eudora Welty, thank you for it all, and a safe journey into the future for your gifts to us who follow along behind you.

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't know exactly what I was expecting from this little book but I wasn't expecting to practically weep through the entire thing. Welty's relationship with her parents made me think of mine with my parents and how little I truly know about either of them.

[varielle_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A brief memoir of Eudora Welty's childhood in Mississippi and the people who influenced the writer she became, it is a pleasant slice of southern life in the early 20th century. Many of the memorable people in her formative years later reappear incognito as characters in her stories. Her family history and accompanying mysteries are contemplated from the aspect of a child trying to figure out the world around her. It doesn't speak of how to right so much as it is about her font of inspiration.

[dmsteyn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I came to this short book through a friend of my mother’s, who, knowing that I am interested in writing, thought that I might enjoy a peek into the creative maturing of one of her favourite writers. And enjoy it I did, despite not having read any of Welty’s novels or short stories. The book had its origins in three lectures to inaugurate the William E. Massey lecture series in 1983 at Harvard, which explains its length. It is a bit of a non-fictional Künstlerroman, with its focus on how Welty’s childhood and her family influenced the development of her creative writing. It is very well-written, which one would expect, but it is also quite touching – Welty’s evocations of her family’s day-to-day life in early twentieth-century America are poignant and deeply felt, with a touch of sadness that never drops into sentimentality. Growing up in the South (Jackson, Mississippi, to be precise) had a large influence on Welty, but the memoir is more concerned with the personal aspects of family life than public affairs. For instance, Welty mentions the furore caused by Faulkner’s Sanctuary only in passing (in fact, she does not even mention Faulkner’s name), and she says little about racial tensions, that other elephant in the room. I had little trouble with this, as the scope of the book is so personal, with little room for extraneous detail.Because of this focus on family and personal experiences, the book can seem a bit parochial, but this is a minor caveat. I also found Welty’s densely-knotted family relations somewhat confusing at times. Not because the different people she remembers are not all memorable characters in their own right; I would just like a family tree at the beginning of the book. What I really did enjoy is Welty’s recounting of her and her family’s reading habits. Her mother seems to have been the main influence on Welty’s reading: she once ran into a burning house to save her complete collection of Dickens. And, despite her father’s disdain for fiction (because, unlike fact, it was not ‘true’) he did not stand in Welty’s way of becoming a writer. Unfortunately, he died before she became published, which leads to a sense of regret throughout the book.Welty’s development as an author is reflected in the titles of the book’s segments: ‘Listening’, ‘Learning to See’, and ‘Finding a Voice’, and is given concrete form through her reflections on events in her young life. How she managed to remember so much in her seventies is beyond me, but it led to a wonderful little book, which I read in two sittings. I think anyone can find something resonant in it, but the book is especially insightful for those bitten by the bugs of reading and writing.

[dreamingtereza_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thoroughly entertaining! Welty is a great storyteller.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Begun as a series of three lectures delivered at Harvard in 1983, Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings traces the confluence of events and history, persons and places, that at that late point looking back upon her writing career she takes to constitute her vision or her voice. While much of any writer’s beginnings will inevitably concern their particular childhood — teachers, key events, distant relatives to whom one learns relation — Welty’s lens plays as much upon her parents as upon herself. And so we learn of her father’s move from Ohio to West Virginia, where he met Eudora’s mother. And we learn how the two young newlyweds made a conscious decision to set out for pastures new, settling in Jackson, Mississippi, where later Eudora is born and raised and where her parents remain the rest of the lives, barring holiday excursions usually to family back in West Virginia or Ohio.Welty has an assured and comfortable gait as she wanders amongst these paths of memory. Without appearing to fixate on telling individuals or activities, she gently associates some of her early experiences with characters in her later stories or novels. More important, perhaps, is the insight she draws from such associations, as though through telling her personal past she is reading her own fiction. The effect is one of clear and penetrating analysis without rancour.The writing is always a pleasure to read and, though brief, it would be hard not to feel at the end as though one had learned a great deal about Welty, as a writer, through this canvassing of some of her important memories. Gently recommended along with a reminder to go back and read Welty’s fiction — all of it.

[janeajones · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've been reading one book by Eudora Welty per summer for the past few years. I've been rationing them out, because there aren't many, and I prefer to savor each, rather than greedily devouring them quickly. Her writing is so lovely and evocative and redolent of summer days. But I broke down this summer and took One Writer's Beginnings with me on vacation after having finished The Optimist's Daughter.The book is a set of three memoir episodes that began as a series of lectures at Harvard in 1983 to inaugurate the William E. Massey lecture series. "Listening" recounts Welty's memories of her early childhood in Jackson, MS; "Learning to See" takes the Welty family and her audience on the road to West Virginia and Ohio where Eudora and her family travelled in the summers to visit her parents' families; and in "Finding a Voice," Welty ponders some of her early writing influences. While the third section is interesting, it is in the first two that Welty's storytelling gifts shine. She lets us breathe the air of the post WWI decades of small town and country life in America.The idea of driving thousands of miles in a 1917 Model T with two children in the back seat absolutely boggles my mind.Edward and I rode with our legs straight out in front of over some suitcases. The rest of the suitcases rode just outside the doors, trapped on the running boards. Cars weren't made with trunks. The tools were kept under the back seat and were heard from in syncopation with the bumps, we'd jump out of the car so Daddy could get them out and jack up the car to patch and vulcanize a tire, or haul out the tow rope or the tire chains. If it rained so hare we couldn't see the road in from of us, we waited it out, snapped in behind the rain curtains and playing "Twenty Questions."