Writings About Mississippi by Eudora Welty

Eudora Alice Welty practically spent her whole life living in Mississippi. Mississippi is the setting in a large portion of her short stories and books. Most of her stories take place in Mississippi because she focuses on the manners of people living in a small Mississippi town. Writing about the lives of Mississippi folk is one main reason Welty is a known author. Welty’s stories are based upon the way humans interact in social encounters. She focuses on women’s situations and consciousness. Another thing she mostly focuses on is isolation. In almost all of Welty’s earlier stories the main character is always being isolated. Throughout her short stories, a hidden message is always evident. Eudora Welty does a wonderful job of exposing social prejudices in the form of buried messages.

Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. Painting and photography were her first early interests. She lived in Jackson with her two brothers, Edward and Walter, and her two parents. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father an insurance executive. Welty’s father was from Ohio and her mother from West Virginia. Welty lived in her childhood home for most of her life. Leaving for two years to attend the Mississippi State College for Women. After she spent several years at the University of Wisconsin and a year in New York City. While in New York City, Welty studied advertising at the Columbia University business school. The death of her father brought Welty back home for a while.

She first started writing, when she came back home after the death of her father. She wrote about the Jackson social scene for the Memphis, Tennessee newspaper. She also was a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration in rural Mississ...

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Although Eudora Alice Welty’s work is sometimes compared to that of Faulkner or Poe. She is by far not as unusual. Throughout her lifetime Welty uncovered the secret of how people treat others. She took a simple subject and turned it into an ongrowing topic. She took the isolation issue and made it aware to her readers. The way she wrote has her readers stopping and thinking about the subject. An underlying message is constantly being weaved throughout the pages of her stories. Eudora Welty showed that, no matter how alone you may feel in a world of people, there is always someone there or something worth fighting to achieve. Whether it is a slave fighting for freedom, a person wanting to committ suicide realizing they will be missed, or even just someone trying to find a place in this world. Therefore isolation is a major influence in Eudora Welty's writing.