The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty [Hardcover]

Eudora Welty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 1980

This complete collection includes all the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are forty-one stories in all, including the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories. With a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

One of the truly great works of twentieth-century American literature, Eudora Welty's Collected Stories confirms her place as a contemporary master of short fiction. Welty wrote novels, novellas, and reviews over the course of her long career, but the heart and soul of her literary vision lay with the short story. The forty-one pieces reproduced here, written over a period of three decades, include "A Petrified Man," "Why I Live at the P.O.,""The Wide Net," and "The Bride of Innisfallen." "I have been told," Welty writes in the introduction, "both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters." The characters that spring to life in this masterwork reveal the depth and breadth of her love.

"Miss Welty's short stories are deceptively simple. They are concerned with ordinary people, but what happens to them and the manner of the telling are far from ordinary . . . A fine writer and a distinguished book. "--The New Yorker

"Eudora Welty is one of our purest, finest, gentlest voices and this collection is something to be treasured."--Anne Tyler

"The ironic tenderness of Chekhov, the almost feral edge of Maupassant, the ominousness of Poe and Bierce, the lacy strength of Henry Green. She is probably the finest Mozartian stylist writing in then English language."--Mary Lee Settle

"Stories as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's . . . The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types-farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery-but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision."--Reynolds Price



Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She worked as a photographer during the Depression and published her first book, a collection of short stories, in 1941. 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. By the time of her death in 2001, Welty had established herself as one of the most important and beloved American writers of the twentieth century.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (October 29, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151189943
• ISBN-13: 978-0151189946
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,453,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy This Book And A Large Highlighter, June 9, 2002

By 

James L. Vickery "Larry Vickery" (Cordova, tn United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Hardcover)

You will run out of highlighter ink reading this one, because there are so many passages you will surely want to reread and savor later.

This grand matriarch of Southern Writer Tradition was first discovered, praised and published by luminaries such as Robert Penn Warren when he was coeditor of The Southern Review, Edward Weeks when he was editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and Mary Louise Aswell, when she was fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar.

This collection of stories is truly worthy to be called a classic. It is sometimes tedious reading, because the stories and characters are complex. After a number of false starts over a period of years, I finally resolved to give this scholarly work the focused time and attention it deserves, and feel richly rewarded for the effort.

Ms. Welty joins the ranks of great writers who prove to us that a great writer does not have to live the experience to effectively write about it. She leaps with ease between characters as diverse as Aaron Burr, a deaf black servant boy, a traveling salesmen, eccentric Southern matrons, and countless others. She portrays them in all of their complexities as if she had lived the experiences of each. Her descriptions of scenes and settings are equally as lucid and believable as if she had first hand knowledge of each. This rare and precious gift is best described in her own words, "I have been told, both in approval and accusation, that I seem to love all of my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high."

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure Southern Gothic, July 11, 2001

By 

hmraymond - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Paperback)

If Flannery O'Connor is the Empress of Southern gothic writing, than Welty is for sure the Queen. Her stories perplex, confuse, amaze and just plain make you happy that people can write like this.

Her short stories are a given on any English professor's syllabus, and with good reason. Not only are they well written and chock full of metaphors and symbolism, but they speak a multi-generational and multi-regional dialect all their own.

Personal fave: Why I Live at the P.O.

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Master of the Short Story., March 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Paperback)

For those who want to jump-start their introduction to southern literature, this is as fine a beginning point as you will find anywhere. The prose is so richly drawn that it feels like poetry, and the images in "A Curtain of Green" and "A Still Moment" will take your breath away. You have to slow down to savor every carefully crafted sentence. Very highly recommended.