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

~ (Author), Richard Ford (Editor), Michael Kreyling (Editor) "It was the close of day when a boat touched Rodney's Landing on the Mississippi River and Clement Musgrove, an innocent planter, with a bag..." (more)
Key Phrases: althea bush, syrup stand, little dirk, Miss Beulah, Uncle Daniel, Aunt Birdie (more...)

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1012 pages
• Publisher: Library of America; Reprint edition (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 188301154X
• ISBN-13: 978-1883011543
• Product Dimensions: 8 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 (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #62,946 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #1 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( F ) > Ford, Richard
  #3 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( W ) > Welty, Eudora

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 56 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 (REAL NAME)

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!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	William Peschel (Hershey, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.