Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Welty, Eudora (Vol. 105) - Carol Shields (review date 12 August 1994)

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Carol Shields (review date 12 August 1994)

SOURCE: "Wafts of the South," in TLS, No. 4767, August 12, 1994, pp. 20-1.

[In the following review, Shields discusses three books: a biography of Eudora Welty, a collection of her book reviews, and her novel The Optimist's Daughter.]

Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, where she still lives. This stern rootedness has always compounded the wonderment in Miss Welty's admirers, for there is, first, her long list of writing accomplishments to contemplate, and then an accompanying respect for her serene, unwriterly willingness to stay put. She is, in a sense, a curiosity in American literary history, a writer who stayed home, who has lived, in fact, in the same house she moved to with her family when she was a girl of sixteen.

Her five novels, her dozens of short stories and essays, and her fine memoir One Writer's Beginnings, all found their sense and shape in an...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Maureen Howard (review date 2 November 1980)
   2. Eudora Welty with Jo Brans (interview date Summer 1981)
   3. Paul Bailey (review date 4 June 1982)
   4. Nancy B. Sederberg (review date Fall 1983)
   5. Eudora Welty with Tom Royals and John Little (interview date 1984)
   6. Eric Homberger (review date 20 July 1984)
   7. Eudora Welty with Barbara Lazear Ascher (interview date Autumn 1984)
   8. Lee Smith (review date Spring 1985)
   9. Daniel Aaron (review date 2 May 1985)
   10. Harriet Pollack (essay date Fall 1986)
   11. Suzanne Marrs (essay date October 1986)
   12. Barbara Harrell Carson (essay date Spring 1988)
   13. Floyd C. Watkins (essay date Spring 1988)
   14. James Walter (essay date Fall 1988)
   15. Eudora Welty with Sally Wolff (interview date January 1990)
   16. Jan Nordby Gretlund (essay date Fall 1992)
   17. Sally Wolff (essay date Fall 1992)
   18. Eben E. Bass (essay date Spring 1993)
   19. Gary M. Ciuba (essay date Fall 1993)
   20. Alexandr Vaschenko (essay date Fall 1993)
   21. Carol Shields (review date 12 August 1994)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Eudora Welty