A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Mississippi author Eudora Welty, the first living writer to be published in the Library of America series, mentored many of today’s greatest fiction writers and is a fascinating woman, having lived the majority of the twentieth century (1909–2001). Her life reflects a century of change and is closely entwined with many events that mark our recent history. This biography follows this twentieth-century path while telling Welty’s story, beginning with her parents and their important influence on her reading and writing life. The chapters that follow focus on her education and her most important teachers; her life during the Depression and how her career, just getting started, is interrupted by World War II; and how she shows independence and courage through her writing during the turbulent civil rights period of the 1950s and 1960s.