 |
GetTextbooks.com
Compare Prices & Save up to 90% |
|
|
|
| Login | Sign up | Settings | My Wish List |
 | | One Writer's Beginnings (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization) by Eudora Welty ISBN-10: 9780674639256 ISBN-10: 0-674-63925-1 ISBN-13: 9780674639256 ISBN-13: 978-0-674-63925-6 Hardcover 2007-08-01 Harvard University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Forty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and nominee for the National Book Critics Award, this incomparable work--part memoir, part essay, and part autobiography--offers a revealing look into the life of one of America's most acclaimed writers. 8 pages of photographs. | ||
Amazon.com Review Among the most beloved of American writers, Eudora Welty's stories and novels have entertained us for over half a century. Here, in her memoirs, she writes with her usual candor and grace about how a writer's sensibilities are shaped. As compelling as her stories, as witty as her personality, as finely honed as her fiction, Welty's account of her life is a powerful and fulfilling read. | ||
Reviews | ||
just wonderful I just recently read this again--each time it grows on me even more. It's a deceptively simple memoir that grows more complex in its structure and style with each re-reading. It's subjective memory at its best, and W's style is just a joy. I'm just back from Jackson, the best place to go after reading the book. | ||
Awesome book I spent my vacation absorbing this book. I had heard of Eudora Welty, but this was my first opportunity to read her writing. I sat in Kentucky, listened to the cicadas singing, and read the words of Miss. Welty. Glorious! | ||
Glimpses Into a Unique Writer's Mind. "Listening," "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice," Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography "One Writer's Beginnings." And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty's compact memoir is notable both because it allows a rare glimpse into the celebrated writer's otherwise fiercely protected private life and it illustrates the roots from which sprang such extraordinary protagonists as "The Ponder Heart"'s Edna Earle and Daniel Ponder, Miss Eckhart and the Morgana families in "The Golden Apples" and, of course, the anti-heroes of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Optimist's Daughter," Judge McKelva, his second wife Fay and (most importantly) his daughter Laurel. A native and -- with minimal exceptions -- lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi, Welty received her first introduction to storytelling as a listener; and early on, learned to sharpen her ears not only to a story's contents but also to its narrator and its protagonists' individual nature: "[T]here [never was] a line read that I didn't hear," and "any room ... at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to," she notes in "One Writer's Beginnings," adding that the discovery that all those stories had been written by someone, not come into existence of their own, not only surprised but also severely disappointed her. Equally importantly, family visits to relatives brought out the born observer in her; each trip providing its own lessons and revelations, each a story onto itself -- the seed from which later grew her manifold unforgettable literary creations. At the same time, her father's interest in technology introduced her to photography as a means of capturing visual impressions, one moment at a time; and when traveling around Mississippi as an agent for a state agency (her first job) she learned to use that camera as "a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know" and discovered that "to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was [then] the greatest need I had." Not surprisingly, her photography was published in several collections which have found much acclaim in their own right. Thus, from early childhood on, Eudora Welty not only had a keen sense of the world around her but also, of words as such: of their existence as much as the interrelation between their sound, physical appearance and the things they stand for. Encouraged by her mother, a teacher, and over her father's worries (he considered fiction writing an occupation of dubitable financial promise and, worse, inferior to fact because it was "not true"), Welty embarked on a writer's path which would lead her to award-winning heights and to a reputation as one of the South's finest writers, with as abounding as obvious comparisons to fellow Mississippian William Faulkner in particular; a literary debt she acknowledged when she wrote that "his work, though it can't increase in itself, increases us" and "[w]hat is written in the South from now on is going to be taken into account by Faulkner's work" ("Must the Novelist Crusade?", 1965). An approach that Welty herself developed early on was to consider the publication of her short stories in periodicals merely a step towards each story's final shape, and she generally revised her stories before including them in their various collections. -- Not only a keen observer, she was also a writer endowed with a sharp sense of humor and satire, and with the gift to brilliantly use location, localisms, accents, patterns of speech and customs to make a point. Yet, "[t]here is no explanation outside fiction for what its writer is learning to do," Eudora Welty maintained in "Writing and Analyzing a Story;" explaining that each story references only the writer's vision at the moment of the creation of that very story, and the creative process itself: nothing that can be "mapped and plotted" but a product taking shape within the process of its creation as such, thus giving each story a unique identity of its own. And considering her reluctance to comment on, or to explain her own fiction writing, the insights into that creative process's origins she allowed her readers in "One Writer's Beginnings" are all the more to be treasured. Also recommended: Eudora Welty : Stories, Essays & Memoir (Library of America, 102) Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America) Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands (Library of America) To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal Legacy Series) | ||
Listening, Learning to See, and Finding A Voice For someone like myself, who is fascinated by the writing process, there is no book I value more than this book by Eudora Welty. The book, beautifully illustrated with family photographs, consists of three lectures delivered by Miss Welty at Harvard University in April 1983. A paragraph written by Miss Welty and inserted at the beginning of the book, in my view, perfectly illustrates the eloquence and subtleties of biography: "When I was young enough to still spend a long time buttoning my shoes in the morning, I'd listen toward the hall: Daddy upstairs was shaving in the bathroom and Mother downstairs was frying the bacon. They would begin whistling back and forth to each other up and down the stairwell. My father would whistle his phrase, my mother would try to whistle, then hum hers back. It was their duet. I drew my buttonhook in and out and listened to it - I knew it was 'The Merry Widow.' The difference was, their song almost floated with laughter: how different from the record, which growled from the beginning, as if the Victrola were only slowly being wound up. They kept it running between them, up and down the stairs where I was now just about ready to run clattering down and show them my shoes." One Writer's Beginnings is divided into three sections, representing the three individual lectures: Listening, Learning to See, and Finding a Voice. As I read "Listening," I felt another good title for it would be "Observing." Miss Welty knows her two parents as, I believe, few children know their parents. Her acute powers of observation--the differences and similarities between these two important people in her life, their separate tastes and talents, the daily habits of their household--are insightful and fascinating to read. This section makes clear how reading and being read to were as regular a ritual in her life as eating three meals a day. I love her observation that "It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass." The author's observations about her life and the people around her are both sensitive and incisive. I quickly realized her reason for calling this chapter "Listening." She does not merely take in the literal content of words. Since childhood, apparently, she heard the cadences of words and the less obvious message of their inner meanings. This has been a particularly helpful revelation for me. With my strict German background, I tend to respond literally to what I hear and see, to what I read and write. Even journalism today does not limit itself to mere reporting, and I gained enormously from reading Miss Welty describe this aspect of her writing. What she does so well is to convey her own feelings inherent in words rather than merely their factual content. In short, she trusts what she hears, she trusts her inner voice that listens... and this is the source of all her writing. Thus, it is not surprising to learn that Miss Welty was unable to feel comfortable with organized religion, that her reverence for the holiness and mystery of life was found in the great churches she visited and her contemplation of the King James Version of the Bible with its beginning offering: "In the beginning was the Word." In the section "Learning to See," Miss Welty describes her love of traveling--road trips in the car for shopping sprees, to visit grandparents. She writes of how Ohio (where her father grew up) had her father "around the heart" as her mother adored West Virginia from whence she came...before her parents settled in Jackson, Mississippi, where Miss Welty lived her entire life. She observes and gives examples illustrating that her father, the optimist, was the one prepared for the worst, and her mother, the pessimist, was the daredevil. How many children see their parents that clearly? In this chapter, we learn a bit about the personalities of Miss Welty's grandparents. Her observations are replete with her love of them...not merely factual recountings of their backgrounds. Perhaps it is here that another of Miss Welty's distinctions lies--her love of the people about whom she writes. Her love and respect for them is as plain between the lines as it is in the words she uses to define herself and her family in this revealing biography. My heart opens as I read her memories on the page, so filled with love are they. It is clear I love every page of this small book, but I confess that my favorite chapter is the last one--"Finding a Voice." I love it best perhaps because it tells of one particular rail trip Miss Welty took with her father and reveals how the support for her becoming a writer came from her mother. She shares her feelings about her college experience, her discovery of poetry, and a host of helpful comments to do with her writing. I love that she writes: "I was always my own teacher." She shares her belief that a writer should remain "invisble," not "effaced" but invisible. A good example of this is her description of a soldier who had unexpectedly stepped off a halted train and was walking across a field into the distance. Rather than describe what she felt in watching him disappear, Miss Welty writes from the soldier's point of view: "...I felt us going out of sight for him, diminishing and soon to be forgotten." Another helpful reminder for me was her discovery that "...all begins with the particular, never the general." There is too much of value in this book for any review to convey it adequately. However, I cannot end before quoting her last brief paragraph: "...I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." There could be no better ending to this treasure of a book. by Duffie Bart for Story Circle Book Reviews reviewing books by, for, and about women | ||
Nice Memoir for Those Interested in Welty I was assigned this book twice in college, when it first came out, and I still don't know why. It's a very nice memoir of growing up in the south, but there's little that has to do with actual writing. The same can be said for a documentary I saw of the same title - Welty is a very intelligent and charming lady, and the book and documentary tell a good deal about her early life, but that's about it. If you wish to learn how someone actually became a writer, and all the challenges of living such a life, you'd be much more rewarded by Somerset Maugham's "The Summing Up," Louis L'Amour's "Autobiography of a Wandering Man," the letters of Keats, Irving Stone's biography of Jack London, and "Women Writers at Work," in which there's a twenty-two page interview with Welty. (In fact, you can find it in the Interview archives of the Paris Review website.) So again, nothing against the author or this book as a memoir, and if you love her stories, then definitely go for it, but if you're thinking of assigning it for a writing class, or simply looking to see how someone became a writer, there are better books to learn from. | ||