Delta Wedding (Harvest/HBJ Book) [Paperback]

Eudora Welty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 1979 | Series: Harvest/HBJ Book

A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family’s preparations for her cousin Dabney’s wedding.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Critically acclaimed for her short stories, the author here presents a novel of a September wedding in Mississippi in the 20's, at Shellmound, homeplace of the Fairchilds, determinedly independent within their close-woven family pattern...Motherless, nine year old Laura McRaven, visits her mother's family as the preparations for Dabney's wedding rush to their finals. Believing herself an outsider, Laura tries hard to become part of the intimate, intricate family existence. There are the old aunts, living in their past loves and hates; Dabney's father, Battle, essence of Fairchild; his wife Ellen, pregnant once again, and still aware of her Virginia origins; Aunt Tempe, the manager, sure that without her the wedding would not be up to family standards. There are the flurried excitements of the last moments before the ceremony, the complex reactions of adults and children, the reception, and Dabney and Troy's return from their honeymoon. A remembrance of customs and personalities, the feel of old roots dying and new roots going down, in lucid yet tortuous prose,- this is quality, rather than quality, merchandise.  (Kirkus Reviews )

From the Back Cover

"The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog. Its real name was the Yazoo-Delta. It was a mixed train. The day was the 10th of September, 1923-afternoon. Laura McRaven, who was nine years old, was on her first journey alone."

So begins Delta Wedding, Eudora Welty's portrait of a large and clamorous Southern family living on their plantation in the Mississippi Delta, and into whose midst Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, is thrust. When Laura arrives, the Fairchilds are preparing for the marriage of Dabney, not the oldest but the prettiest of the Fairchild girls. Drama leads to drama, revelation to revelation. The result is a sometimes riotous portrait of a Southern family and the motherless child who learns to become one of them. Eudora Welty's first novel remains an American classic.

"By all odds the best thing [Eudora Welty] has written."
--The Atlantic

"Presents the essence of the Deep South and does it with infinite finesse."
--The Christian Science Monitor

"The portrait she gives us . . . is nothing short of wonderful, and the way she gets hold the particular quality of Southern speech, with its nuances, obliquities, and special kind of humor, is a minor triumph."--The New Yorker


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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (March 21, 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156252805
• ISBN-13: 978-0156252805
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #144,478 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

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like being a member of the family, August 21, 2000

By 

Dianne Merridith - See all my reviews

This review is from: Delta Wedding (Harvest/HBJ Book) (Paperback)

Reading "Delta Wedding" is like attending a family wedding and meeting all your distant relatives for the first time. You have a sense of belonging and, at the same time, a sense of being an outsider. Everyone seems to know everyone so much better than you do and you're rushing to catch up on everyone's story and sort out who is who. This is a relatively short book, but perhaps because she is primarily a short-story writer, Eudora Welty has packed this book so densely with character and detail, you will feel as though you have read a family saga of many hundred pages. The delta is recreated in such detail that you can feel the humid, misty breezes and hear the crickets chirping. The young girls through whose perspective you watch the proceedings are enchanting. Struggling to keep track of the characters forced me to go back and re-read parts of the book at times, which was, in fact, helpful in discovering important overlooked details. This is a book you can re-read many times always discovering something or someone new. Eudora Welty ranks at the very top of Southern writers and American writers in general.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Alienation in a large family, May 13, 2005

By 

A.J. (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Delta Wedding (Harvest/HBJ Book) (Paperback)

When you see the title "Delta Wedding," please don't assume that Eudora Welty's novel is either a gaudy supermarket romance or a pollyanna tribute to nuptial celebration and Southern domesticity. It is about the events leading up to a wedding, and of course there is plenty of talk about dresses and cooking and dancing, but Welty, almost like Virginia Woolf's American counterpart, suffuses the atmosphere with mysterious psychological undercurrents and the foreboding aura of secrecy. We get the sense that there is more to these people's personalities than the text can convey, and we read on patiently and attentively, hoping to unravel the complexities.

The setting is the area of central Mississippi through which the Yazoo River flows, not far from Faulkner country geographically or literarily; much of the land in this particular locality is owned by a family named the Fairchilds, the dynastic centerpiece of the story. The prevalent symbol in the novel is a train called the Yellow Dog, the principal means of mass transportation that connects this part of Mississippi to the rest of the state. This is the train that brings nine-year-old Laura McRaven from Jackson to visit the Fairchilds, her cousins, on their plantation, where Dabney (that's a girl) Fairchild is engaged to be married within the week to a man twice her age named Troy Flavin.

It is also the train that, not long before the novel begins, nearly ran over Laura's uncle George as he tried to rescue his addled niece Maureen who had caught her foot in a trestle. George's wife Robbie had witnessed this near-accident and now is using it as an excuse to leave him--how could he be so selfish as to risk his life and widow her? Although this does not speak well of Robbie's character, the source of her discontent is really alienation. She knows that she is beneath George's station, and every instance in which he bonds with another Fairchild only affirms that the Fairchild mystique is a closed circle, impenetrable to her.

For a novel concerned about a wedding in the immediate present, it is deeply immersed in its characters' pasts. Laura is an only child whose mother has recently passed away, so this large house where she is surrounded by myriad cousins, aunts, and uncles, like legendary creatures whose fantastic world she has suddenly entered, is an awesome environment with a rich and intricate history. The Fairchilds are such a regional monument that the entire town cemetery is practically their very own mausoleum; Dr. Murdoch, the insensitive local physician, picks out future burial plots for Fairchilds as though he were deciding where to plant flowers in a garden.

One interesting characteristic of "Delta Wedding" is that, true to impressionistic storytelling, there is no traditional protagonist that I could identify. Laura receives much of the focus, but this is not really her story, nor is it narrated in her voice. Dabney is too shallow and spoiled to be a heroine; her older sister Shelley, a smarter and more serious girl, is not interested in being a heroine, and good for her. "Delta Wedding" does well without a hero because it is realistic fiction at its most crystalline; a sincere, authentic depiction of life in the rural deep South of the 1920s which shows a part of the country modernizing to the twentieth century even while clinging to the shadows of the past.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Song of the South, June 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Delta Wedding (Hardcover)

As a lifelong Southern girl, I find that there are three authors who can fully unveil the truth about the south: Shelby Foote, William Faulkner, and Miss Eudora Welty. This book beautifully tells the story of Laura McRaven, a young girl visiting her deceased mother's family in the Mississippi delta, ostensibly to attend Cousin Dabney's wedding. Miss Welty has a true gift for evoking the smells, tastes, and sounds of the rural south. You will feel that you have spent the summer with the Fairchild clan. Not to be missed as a benchmark in southern literature. Yankees will vow to move south.