Eudora Welty And Sherman Alexie Comparison Essay

Eudora Welty and Sherman Alexie were born half a century apart, raised in completely different cultures, and had different financial lives. Eudora Welty was born in Mississippi and grew up in a middle-class house while Sherman Alexie was born on a tribal reservation in the state of Washington and grew up “middle-class by reservation standards (Alexie 496)” but was actually poor. Although they almost lived completely different lives, they shared many similarities. Throughout One Writer’s Beginnings and Superman and Me, both Eudora Welty and Sherman Alexie gained their love for books at a very young age. Every kid growing up looks to their parents for guidance and ends up inheriting many of their traits while growing up. Eudora Welty’s mom

However they both look at it a different way. Sherman Alexie was surprised that he became a writer. “Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories, and poems (Alexie 498).” When he was younger, Indian children were expected to be school stupid. He overcame that and today he visits schools and teaches creative writing to Indian kids. “I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories, or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories, and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation (Alexie 498).” While Sherman Alexie uses his writing skills to help others, Welty uses her skills to help her hear her writing. “Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice or any person I can identify, certainly not my own (Welty 495).” She also mentions this at the end of her story, “My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound