Carolyn Brown tells us how she came to write a new biography on Eudora Welty.
My love of Eudora Welty goes back 20 years, to graduate school at UNC-Greensboro, and a class I was taking in literary theory. In that class I was given a very open-ended assignment: take one of the modern literary theories we had studied (Jung, Nietzsche, Derrida, etc.) and apply that theory to an author’s work (any author). Why I chose Welty I do not know, but I took a few of the short stories in A Curtain of Green and The Wide Net and explained that the mystery of Welty’s fiction can be understood as a tension between the Apollonian and Dionysiac visions of the world described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In very simplistic terms, characters like Mrs. Larkin from “A Curtain of Green,” Hazel Wallace in “The Wide Net,” and Howard in “Flowers for Marjorie” seek order (Apollo) amidst the chaos (Dionysos) of their worlds. This graduate school paper was the first article I ever published; it appeared in the 1990 edition of the journal Notes on Mississippi Writers.
Flash forward to 2006. I am married with two children, and my husband gets a job in Jackson. I haven’t thought much about Eudora in the intervening years, but I receive a gift from the company which is wooing my husband to Jackson. It is Suzanne Marrs’ biography of Eudora, newly published and signed by the author! I am overwhelmed. I think, “This company gets it–this is not the standard fruit basket. It’s a wonderful, meaningful gift.” We move to Jackson, and a few months later I am hired by Millsaps and meet the author, Suzanne Marrs.
Since I have lived in Jackson, I have loved seeing the Welty House and Visitors Center grow–moving from Eudora’s garage into the beautiful facility that houses the museum today. I have loved giving tours, making presentations to the docents, and working closely with Suzanne on her books. Living in what I affectionately call “Welty World” reawakened my love of the author and my desire to write about her again.
The idea for the biography grew out of my own enjoyment of reading biographies as a young girl, especially biographies of strong women, as well as being a mother to middle school and high school age boys. It became apparent to me that there was a dearth of biographies in general for middle and high school age students. It’s a wide open field–there are many writers like Welty who have a long scholarly biography devoted to their life and accomplishments, but not a shorter one that offers an introduction to their lives and works. I also believe students and all readers can learn a lot about recent history as Welty’s life closely follows the 20th century arc, and she was closely affected by the major historical events of the century–the depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. Finally, I believe Mississippi needs more biographies of their famous citizens, which is why I am writing a second one–on Jackson writer Margaret Walker–whose papers, like Welty’s, are archived here and whose life is also a great example from which we can learn. -Carolyn Brown
A signing for Carolyn Brown will be held Wednesday, August 15th at 5:00. A reading will follow at 5:30. Click here for more details.
A Daring Life is published by University Press of Mississippi. Signed copies are available at Lemuria, $20.
wwwwww
Comments are closed.