preview

Essay about Writings About Mississippi by Eudora Welty

Better Essays

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 …show more content…

Welty is also known as the first woman to enter Peterhouse College(“Eudora Welty”). Eudora Welty may have traveled around to different cities and states, but she always anchored herself in Jackson, Mississippi. Eudora Welty did not have any kids or even a husband. Therefore the only family she had lived in Jackson. This may be a reason to why she constantly returned home and why a good portion of her stories take place in Mississippi. Her nice, modest, and polite attitude always made people around her comfortable. Welty was greatly respected for her “southern hospitality.” This attitude is portrayed in most of Welty’s short stories.
Eudora Welty used the most strangest characters to personify human interactions. Characters in her book include murderers, psychotics, suicides, deaf-mutes, the mentally retarded, the senile, and a group of people known as “commoners.” Welty used completely opposite people to show, how they react and can overcome a problem. Metropolitan reviewers make superficial comparisons with Faulkner and Poe(Bryant 261). Comparing Eudora Welty to Faulkner and Poe is rather strange. She may have wrote about murders, but the stories were not creepy or weird. Welty simply used these characters to grab the attention of readers.
In almost all of Welty’s early short stories, the main problem is isolation. The fact of isolation , whatever its nature, provides the basic situation of Eudora Welty’s fiction (Warren

Get Access