Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America) [Hardcover]

Eudora Welty (Author), Richard Ford (Editor), Michael Kreyling (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Library of America | Publication Date: August 1, 1998

This two-volume collection reveals the singular imaginative power of one of America's most admired Southern writers. "Complete Novels" gathers all of Welty's longer fiction, from "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942) to her Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Optimist's Daughter" (1972).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This Library of America volume gathers all the long fiction published by the beloved Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Throughout her long and storied career, Welty has been most famous, perhaps, for her short stories. But it's in her novels that she attempted some of her most ambitious and powerful creations: the idiosyncratic fable that is The Robber Bridegroom, drawing on legends, local history, folktale, and myth; the underrated, wickedly funny short novel The Ponder Heart; and Losing Battles, a familial epic 15 years in the making and begun in bits and pieces while Welty cared for her sick mother. In a strange inversion of the author's usual career trajectory, Welty's only attempt at a roman à clef came late in life, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Optimist's Daughter, the quiet, moving, largely autobiographical story of a woman coming to grips with her father's death. The novels alone earn Welty a place as one of the finest writers our century has produced; taken together with the Library of America companion volume, Stories, Essays, & Memoir, it's a body of work that William Maxwell calls "beyond human power of praising." Welty rarely strayed for long from the place of her birth, but her fiction is as capacious as the human heart itself. Like Faulkner, she has taken her own corner of Mississippi and made it encompass the world.

From Library Journal

Congratuations to Welty on becoming the first living writer to be included among the Library of America's prestigious ranks. This sterling collection includes an amalgam of all her longer fiction, such as The Robber Bridegroom, The Ponder Heart, and The Optimist's Daughter, as well as her complete short fiction, plus a selection of essays and autobiographical writings.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1012 pages
• Publisher: Library of America (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 188301154X
• ISBN-13: 978-1883011543
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #195,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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60 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Greatest living southern writer, June 14, 2001

By 

Theron Ferry (New Orleans, Louisiana USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America) (Hardcover)

I began my acquaintance with Eudora Welty's works in college with One Writer's Beginnings and fell in love with the lyrics of her writing. I moved on to her short stories where I believe Ms. Welty surely shines brightest, but her novels are almost as wonderful. Very few people have the depth of insight into the mind and motivations of southerners that Eudora Welty has. She is right up there with William Faulkner. She has the gift of seeing and conveying the universal experiences of her decidedly regional cast of characters.

Since this is a collection of all of Ms. Welty's novels it is difficult to give a concise review. Suffice it to say that for reading pleasure you will not spend better money. The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize, but Losing Battles may be even better (the novel centers on all of the family stories told at a huge family reunion--great framing device for so many wonderful tales). The Robber Bridegroom is a southern fairy tale.

Eudora Welty is a giant of literature. This is a great Library of America collection. Buy it!

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mistress of Southern Fiction, December 20, 2006

By 

Author Bill Peschel "Writers Gone Wild" (Hershey, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America) (Hardcover)

Each new volume from The Library of America, the non-profit publisher that has become the de facto literary hall of fame, is a cause for celebration. Its goal of preserving in an enduring format the best fiction and non-fiction is a significant bulwark against the encroaching tides of cultural relativism that attempts to render any value judgments meaningless, as well as a consumer society that insists that if it ain't new, it ain't good.

In the case of Eudora Welty, we're given two volumes: a collection of five novels ("The Robber Bridegroom," "Delta Wedding," "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles" and the Pulitzer-winning "The Optimist's Daughter"), and another of her essays, her memoir "One Writer's Beginnings" and her short stories. From her first published short stories, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in 1937, to her last novel in 1972, Welty captures with her highly readable style and sharp eye and ear the varieties and eccentricities of Southern life.

But while the South claims Welty as one of its own, she may not necessarily return the favor. Teh cause is both geographic and a matter of choice. Although she was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1909 and lived there all her life, her father was from Ohio and her mother from West Virginia, a state created by the Civil War that went for the Union. This isn't Margaret Mitchell we're talking about here.

Then, in her essay "Place in Fiction," she stresses that while it is important for a writer to capture the feeling of an area, it is not the paramount goal in fiction:

"It is through place that we put out roots ... but where those roots reach toward ... is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding."

But what pedigree does not provide, her environment probably did, for her work contains those elements poularly associated with Southern fiction. "Delta Wedding" celebrates the Southern family through the sprawling Fairchild clan and its passel of sons, daughters, cousins, aunts, great-aunts, nieces and nephews, all involved in each others' lives to a degree rarely seen today.

Many of her stories revolve around characters marginalized by society, struggling to exist and reach out to others: the simple Lily Daw who tries to evade the determination of the town's ladies to either marry her off or send her to the asylum; the generous, slightly retarded Daniel Ponder who would give away everything he has at the drop of a hat; the demented Clytie in "A Curtain of Green," who rushes about looking in people's faces until, seeing her reflection in a barrel of rainwater, dives in and drowns.

Eudora Welty was a sharp, perceptive writer, and her enshrinement by the Library of America is most welcome.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eudora Welty's Novels in the Library of America, June 22, 2011

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America) (Hardcover)

I became interested in reading further in Eudora Welty (1909 -- 2001) after reading a recently published volume of her correspondence with her friend and editor, William Maxwell. What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell Thus, I read this Library of America volume which includes Welty's complete novels. A companion volume in the Library of America includes her stories, for which she is better known, together with her essays. Eudora Welty : Stories, Essays & Memoir (Library of America, 102) When the Library of America published its two volumes of Welty's writings in 1998, it was the first time that the series had published the work of a living American writer.

Welty was born and lived her entire life in Jackson, Mississippi. All her novels are set in Misssippi and have a strong, precise local character. Yet each is an individual work. It is difficult not to fall in love with the state and its people in reading Welty. In addition to writing, Welty had a strong professional interest in photography which shows, I think, in her novels. The books show a strong interest in description, both of places and people. Many passages have an almost photographic quality of a writer with a sharp eye,but the books capture nuances of meaning and thought that photographs can develop only rarely. Of the five novels, four are short. Welty takes small scenes and places and works them closely. The long novel, "Losing Battles" is itself a collection of small scenes and stories joined together. There is a great deal of humor in the novels, but in precision and detail of the writing, they make demanding reading. The novels span much of Welty's lengthy career as a writer. She published her first novel in 1942 and her final novel in 1972. This Library of America volume includes each of the novels together with a valuable chronology of Welty's life and short textual notes. My brief thoughts on each of the novels follow below.

Welty's first novel, "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942) is a short, historical work set in the late 18th Century. It is a mixture of legend, fairy tale, and realism told with humor, quickness, and style. The characters include the legendary, swaggering riverboat man, Mike Fink. The story is a contrast of innocence and naivety with greed and cupidity. The book is one of two Welty novels that became a Broadway play.

Set in a small town in the Mississippi Delta in 1923, "Delta Wedding" (1946) is quissessential Welty. The book describes the wedding of young Dabney Fairchild, 17, of a close-knit wealthy plantation family, to Troy Flavin,34, the overseer of the family plantation. The short book moves slowly and deliberately as it offers a portrayal of a family, the Delta in all its aspects, and change. A major character in the book, George Fairchild, shows exhuberance in his acceptance of life and people.

Welty received the William Howells Medal for Fiction for her short novel of 1954, "The Ponder Heart." This novel also became a Broadway play and musical. The book tells the story of a decaying Mississippi family when one of its more eccentric members marries into a family commonly described as "trash". The book is told in the brilliantly unreliable voice of one Edna Earle Ponder who describes small-town Mississippi, a murder, and a trial. It is an enigmatic comedy that may bear a variety of readings.

Fifteen years separated "The Ponder Heart" from Welty's next novel, the lengthy "Losing Battles" which was shortlisted for the National Book Award. This book is set in northeastern Missisippi in 1931 in the midst of the Great Depression. It takes place during a family reunion for the birthday of a family matriarch. The book is a series of humorous short stories and vignettes that Welty wrote over the years and pieced together to form the novel. The major character is young Jack Renfro who has just escaped from Parchman Prison one day before his scheduled release to attend the reunion. In this long story, Welty describes her poor, hardscrabble people unsentimentally but with love. The reader comes to know almost every aspect of them.

Welty received the Pulitzer Prize for her final and I think best novel, "The Optimist's Daughter" (1972), which is set in Mississippi, New Orleans, and West Virginia. This is the only Welty novel which includes a significant autobiographical element. It tells the story of change and of clashing personalities in values in the conflict between the major character, Laura McKelva, 44, and her father's second wife, Fay, 40 following the death of Judge McKelva. "The Optimist's Daughter" is a story of place, loss, loneliness and, ultimately of accepting oneself and moving ahead with life.

Welty was a writer rooted to place. In her sense of locality and detail, her works describe a particulalry local way of life and yet reach towards the universal. I enjoyed reading this subtle and demanding writer. For those readers wanting to read more detailed reviews of the individual novels, I am attaching links below.

The Robber Bridegroom
Delta Wedding
The Ponder Heart
Losing Battles
Optimist's Daughter

Robin Friedman