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3.99 AVERAGE
3.99 AVERAGE
funny
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This was a lovely introduction to Eudora Welty. I loved reading about her literary rich childhood and her parents’ influence. Now I need to decide where to begin with her works of fiction. I’m excited to read more.
A lovely, rich re-read for me, fully appreciated from the different angle of my life now, as it was from the angle of my life 20 years ago.
In One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), Eudora Welty warmly invites the reader into a glimpse of her childhood and the events that shaped her into a writer. Welty was born in 1909, and she lived in Jackson, Mississippi, until she went to New York to actively pursue her writing career. Using divine description, Welty reveals a collection of simple moments that guided her journey to become a writer.
Because I had never read anything by Eudora Welty, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up One Writer’s Beginnings. At best, when I turned to the first page, I anticipated a creative retelling of Welty’s childhood in the early 1900s. What I didn’t expect was the immediate, refreshing desire to curl up in a chair illuminated in dim lamplight and be perfectly content to read deep into the night. In many ways, settling into this memoir felt like coming home. Welty’s writing style gives the memoir an airy atmosphere of nostalgia and tenderness.
Welty explains that her love for reading, writing, and stories began early, even when she was still a child. She completely captures the essence of a child’s perspective toward books when she writes, “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” (Welty 1984, 5). As children, we had little conception of what is created and what is already existent. We guilelessly assumed that shelter and sustenance had always been, the same way that mountains and rivers have always existed. But as we grew older, we noticed the surrounding world as something that Someone had carefully carved into the earth for a specific purpose. One Writer’s Beginnings focuses on Welty’s understanding of how incidences in her life existed for the purpose of her learning how to effectively use her gift for writing.
Welty writes through an analytical lens. Her memoir doesn’t rely upon facts and figures, but on the little details ordinarily missed by those who don’t look as closely at the world around them. And Welty finds those moments and shares them with the reader. She has the gift to perceive how circumstances have the power to unearth parts of humans that they hadn’t previously recognized. Welty’s mother once ran into their burning house to save her collection of Dickens novels. This courageous action sparks Welty to contemplate whether she “would go through fire and water for it as my mother had done for Charles Dickens” (Welty 1984, 9). Throughout this memoir, Welty unveils qualities in her mother that she later discovered within her own spirit. I enjoyed these parallels between mother and daughter because they compelled me to consider my own relationship with my mother and how we are alike.
Although Welty effectively uses description, she sometimes includes too much of her family’s history. The backgrounds of her parents and grandparents somewhat delay the story because the reader expects to read only of what Eudora Welty thinks, not what her grandfather may have said twenty years before. Nonetheless, you will enjoy the descriptions. Welty writes these little details in a way that she would tell someone who’s just moved into town, someone who doesn’t yet know who’s related to whom, or how they came to be, or how things used to be.
During these detours, I felt temporarily lost, but once Welty ties the threads together, I realized how those roundabout additions develop the story even further. Because Welty is a Southern writer, she is more apt to take long, leisurely strolls in the garden of the past and lackadaisically pick the stories one by one that she wants to tell. But each story that Welty shares is dusted with meaning that she relates to being a writer. By the end of the memoir, you will be pleasantly surprised.
When Welty wrote One Writer’s Beginnings, she was in her seventies, and somehow her life may have seemed suddenly clearer when she viewed it in hindsight. She says, “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists” (Welty 1984, 90). Sprinkled throughout the memoir are moments that Welty has looked back on and pondered, at last noticing the connection between the scattered, frenzied moments that life seemed to toss at her feet. Those moments always seem to tie back to her love for writing.
In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty reflects on what being a writer means to her. She tenderly wrote this memoir using moments from her childhood that shaped her into the successful Southern writer that she became. Writers will want to read this memoir to gather a fresh perspective from a seasoned, successful writer. Teachers also will benefit from reading a book like this that would better equip them to teach amateur writers. Even though Welty’s walks in the past can be rather long, this book is still an engaging, delightful read. By the end of One Writer’s Beginnings, you will feel as if you had just had spent the evening talking to Eudora Welty and are parting ways as the closest of friends.
Because I had never read anything by Eudora Welty, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up One Writer’s Beginnings. At best, when I turned to the first page, I anticipated a creative retelling of Welty’s childhood in the early 1900s. What I didn’t expect was the immediate, refreshing desire to curl up in a chair illuminated in dim lamplight and be perfectly content to read deep into the night. In many ways, settling into this memoir felt like coming home. Welty’s writing style gives the memoir an airy atmosphere of nostalgia and tenderness.
Welty explains that her love for reading, writing, and stories began early, even when she was still a child. She completely captures the essence of a child’s perspective toward books when she writes, “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” (Welty 1984, 5). As children, we had little conception of what is created and what is already existent. We guilelessly assumed that shelter and sustenance had always been, the same way that mountains and rivers have always existed. But as we grew older, we noticed the surrounding world as something that Someone had carefully carved into the earth for a specific purpose. One Writer’s Beginnings focuses on Welty’s understanding of how incidences in her life existed for the purpose of her learning how to effectively use her gift for writing.
Welty writes through an analytical lens. Her memoir doesn’t rely upon facts and figures, but on the little details ordinarily missed by those who don’t look as closely at the world around them. And Welty finds those moments and shares them with the reader. She has the gift to perceive how circumstances have the power to unearth parts of humans that they hadn’t previously recognized. Welty’s mother once ran into their burning house to save her collection of Dickens novels. This courageous action sparks Welty to contemplate whether she “would go through fire and water for it as my mother had done for Charles Dickens” (Welty 1984, 9). Throughout this memoir, Welty unveils qualities in her mother that she later discovered within her own spirit. I enjoyed these parallels between mother and daughter because they compelled me to consider my own relationship with my mother and how we are alike.
Although Welty effectively uses description, she sometimes includes too much of her family’s history. The backgrounds of her parents and grandparents somewhat delay the story because the reader expects to read only of what Eudora Welty thinks, not what her grandfather may have said twenty years before. Nonetheless, you will enjoy the descriptions. Welty writes these little details in a way that she would tell someone who’s just moved into town, someone who doesn’t yet know who’s related to whom, or how they came to be, or how things used to be.
During these detours, I felt temporarily lost, but once Welty ties the threads together, I realized how those roundabout additions develop the story even further. Because Welty is a Southern writer, she is more apt to take long, leisurely strolls in the garden of the past and lackadaisically pick the stories one by one that she wants to tell. But each story that Welty shares is dusted with meaning that she relates to being a writer. By the end of the memoir, you will be pleasantly surprised.
When Welty wrote One Writer’s Beginnings, she was in her seventies, and somehow her life may have seemed suddenly clearer when she viewed it in hindsight. She says, “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists” (Welty 1984, 90). Sprinkled throughout the memoir are moments that Welty has looked back on and pondered, at last noticing the connection between the scattered, frenzied moments that life seemed to toss at her feet. Those moments always seem to tie back to her love for writing.
In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty reflects on what being a writer means to her. She tenderly wrote this memoir using moments from her childhood that shaped her into the successful Southern writer that she became. Writers will want to read this memoir to gather a fresh perspective from a seasoned, successful writer. Teachers also will benefit from reading a book like this that would better equip them to teach amateur writers. Even though Welty’s walks in the past can be rather long, this book is still an engaging, delightful read. By the end of One Writer’s Beginnings, you will feel as if you had just had spent the evening talking to Eudora Welty and are parting ways as the closest of friends.
Welty has a gift for wonderfully descriptive prose, but toward the end of the third part, she begins to slip into some broader philosophy that dilutes her message.
I very much enjoy Eudora Welty's fiction, but know comparatively little about her childhood. I read the wonderful What There Is To Say We Have Said a couple of years ago, which features much of the correspondence between Welty and another favourite author of mine, William Maxwell. This autobiographical work, which is composed of a wealth of memories largely from Welty's Mississippi childhood, works as a wonderful companion volume.
Of One Writer's Beginnings, William Maxwell writes, 'It is all wonderful... The parts of the book that are about her family... are by turns hilarious and affecting. They are a kind of present... from Miss Welty to her audience.' Penelope Lively believes it to be a piece of 'entrancing reading', and Paul Binding writes in the New Statesman: 'A writer for whom "genius" is for once a not inappropriate word... A book of great sensitivity - as controlled and yet aspiring as a lyric poem.'
In One Writer's Beginnings, which was first published in 1984, Welty decided to tell her story in one 'continuous thread of revelation'. The book provides, says its blurb, '... an exploration of memory by one of America's finest writers, whose many honours include the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award for Fiction, and the Gold Medal for the novel.' This book consists of three essays - 'Listening', 'Learning to See', and 'Finding a Voice' - which have been transcribed from a set of three lectures which Welty gave at Harvard University in April 1983.
When 'Listening' begins, Welty's words set the scene immediately: 'In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks.' Throughout, Welty's voice is lyrical, candid, and often quite moving. She reveals her deep love of books, which was present even when she was a tiny child. 'I learned,' she writes, 'from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.' Welty's writing is particularly beautiful when she discusses her love of stories: '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. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.'
In a series of vignettes, Welty talks about stargazing, singing, childhood illness, learning the alphabet, religion, schooling, and the quirks of her in some ways unconventional parents, amongst other things. The imagery which she conjures up is often lovely; for instance: 'All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Whole families attended together in the evenings, at least once a week, and children were allowed to go without chaperone in the long summer afternoons - schoolmates with their best friends, pairs of little girls trotting on foot the short distance through the park to town under their Japanese parasols.' When she discusses the travels which she went on with her family each summer, she writes of their positive effect upon her later writing: 'I think now, in looking back on these summer trips - this one and a number later, made in the car and on the train - that another element in them must have been influencing my mind. The trips were wholes unto themselves. They were stories. Not only in form, but their taking on direction, movement, development, change. They changed something in my life: each trip made its particular revelation, though I could not have found words for it. But with the passage of time, I could look back on them and see them bringing me news, discoveries, premonitions, promises - I still can; they still do.'
One Writer's Beginnings spans Welty's childhood, and includes comparatively brief reflections about her time at college, and the early days of her writing career. She is insightful about the creation of her characters, and the knowledge which one must have as an author to create enough depth. 'Characters take on a life sometimes by luck,' writes Welty, 'but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.'
One Writer's Beginnings is a beautifully written celebration of stories, of Welty's own, and of those which filled her girlhood. I was pulled in immediately, transported to the Deep South in the early twentieth century. This is a joyous account, filled with depth and insight. Welty's voice is utterly charming, and sometimes quite profound. I shall close this review with one of the most wonderful quotes from the book: 'The memory is a living thing - it too is in transit. But during the moment, all that is remembered joins and lives - the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.'
Of One Writer's Beginnings, William Maxwell writes, 'It is all wonderful... The parts of the book that are about her family... are by turns hilarious and affecting. They are a kind of present... from Miss Welty to her audience.' Penelope Lively believes it to be a piece of 'entrancing reading', and Paul Binding writes in the New Statesman: 'A writer for whom "genius" is for once a not inappropriate word... A book of great sensitivity - as controlled and yet aspiring as a lyric poem.'
In One Writer's Beginnings, which was first published in 1984, Welty decided to tell her story in one 'continuous thread of revelation'. The book provides, says its blurb, '... an exploration of memory by one of America's finest writers, whose many honours include the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award for Fiction, and the Gold Medal for the novel.' This book consists of three essays - 'Listening', 'Learning to See', and 'Finding a Voice' - which have been transcribed from a set of three lectures which Welty gave at Harvard University in April 1983.
When 'Listening' begins, Welty's words set the scene immediately: 'In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks.' Throughout, Welty's voice is lyrical, candid, and often quite moving. She reveals her deep love of books, which was present even when she was a tiny child. 'I learned,' she writes, 'from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.' Welty's writing is particularly beautiful when she discusses her love of stories: '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. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.'
In a series of vignettes, Welty talks about stargazing, singing, childhood illness, learning the alphabet, religion, schooling, and the quirks of her in some ways unconventional parents, amongst other things. The imagery which she conjures up is often lovely; for instance: 'All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Whole families attended together in the evenings, at least once a week, and children were allowed to go without chaperone in the long summer afternoons - schoolmates with their best friends, pairs of little girls trotting on foot the short distance through the park to town under their Japanese parasols.' When she discusses the travels which she went on with her family each summer, she writes of their positive effect upon her later writing: 'I think now, in looking back on these summer trips - this one and a number later, made in the car and on the train - that another element in them must have been influencing my mind. The trips were wholes unto themselves. They were stories. Not only in form, but their taking on direction, movement, development, change. They changed something in my life: each trip made its particular revelation, though I could not have found words for it. But with the passage of time, I could look back on them and see them bringing me news, discoveries, premonitions, promises - I still can; they still do.'
One Writer's Beginnings spans Welty's childhood, and includes comparatively brief reflections about her time at college, and the early days of her writing career. She is insightful about the creation of her characters, and the knowledge which one must have as an author to create enough depth. 'Characters take on a life sometimes by luck,' writes Welty, 'but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.'
One Writer's Beginnings is a beautifully written celebration of stories, of Welty's own, and of those which filled her girlhood. I was pulled in immediately, transported to the Deep South in the early twentieth century. This is a joyous account, filled with depth and insight. Welty's voice is utterly charming, and sometimes quite profound. I shall close this review with one of the most wonderful quotes from the book: 'The memory is a living thing - it too is in transit. But during the moment, all that is remembered joins and lives - the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.'
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.
Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.
My Review: The unassuming, delight-filled, unsparingly un-self-indulgent prose of Miss Eudora's fiction is surpassed in this expansion and revision of her Massey Lecture in the History of American Civilization, delivered at Harvard in 1983. For anyone unacquainted with Miss Eudora's literary output, I recommend starting with short fiction ("The Bride of the Innisfallen" is a good starter, followed by "Why I Live at the P.O."), moving on to her chef d'ouevre, the novel The Ponder Heart; this memoir, all 104pp of it, should come after one knows whether one is able to appreciate the particularities and glories of Miss Eudora's work. While I think she would appeal to any able-minded reader, I know from experience that her beautiful sentences sound like preciosity to some readers: eg, "Over a stronghold of a face, the blue hat of the lady in the raincoat was settled on like an Indian bonnet, or, rather, like an old hat, which it was." (from "The Bride of the Innisfallen")
This, to me, is equaled in English by Nabokov's terse clarity, and by little else; but it has been cited to me several times as unendurably cutesy or simply overwritten. I so completely disagree that it's hard to credit the opinion-havers with a shred of taste; however, there are tastes, and there are tastes, so I move on from my digression.
One Writer's Beginnings is told in a narrative voice much like her fiction; it is constructed like the linear tale that a life is when it is reflected on at leisure; and there are so many things in her history, from 1909 and her birth until her last entry in the lecture, a trip by train to New York during the Great Depression as a WPA junior publicity agent, that clearly formed a consciousness of time and place and rightness of things that she uses to such telling effect in her stories. An anecdote early in the book of her parents' morning routine of whistling and humming back and forth up and down the stairs phrases from "The Merry Widow Waltz" illuminates for me the means by which this shy, never-married lady "got" the signals of relationship that are so necessary to the parties in happiness. Another moment, the discovery of two nickels preserved in a hidden box, teaches me that Miss Eudora never felt any unmixed emotion (I won't tell that story, it must be read to be understood) and that is why The Ponder Heart is such a landmark in Southern ficiton.
The death of Miss Eudora's beloved father in 1931 is simply too painful for her to go into; she elides the details and leaves us to infer her pain. It fits with her lifelong lack of interest in talking about herself, but it leaves the reader without an anchor in what had to be a turbulent passage in her life. I can't fault the lady for her reticence, but in this as in several other areas, it would have behooved Miss Eudora to have let others guide her in preparing these talks so as to answer more questions:
Well, and therein the rub: It was the last thing she ever wanted to do, answer questions, and it's also why she wrote such marvelous stories, to answer them all unasked:
Miss Eudora Welty, thank you for all of it, and a safe journey into the future for your gifts to us who follow along behind you.
The Publisher Says: Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.
Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.
My Review: The unassuming, delight-filled, unsparingly un-self-indulgent prose of Miss Eudora's fiction is surpassed in this expansion and revision of her Massey Lecture in the History of American Civilization, delivered at Harvard in 1983. For anyone unacquainted with Miss Eudora's literary output, I recommend starting with short fiction ("The Bride of the Innisfallen" is a good starter, followed by "Why I Live at the P.O."), moving on to her chef d'ouevre, the novel The Ponder Heart; this memoir, all 104pp of it, should come after one knows whether one is able to appreciate the particularities and glories of Miss Eudora's work. While I think she would appeal to any able-minded reader, I know from experience that her beautiful sentences sound like preciosity to some readers: eg, "Over a stronghold of a face, the blue hat of the lady in the raincoat was settled on like an Indian bonnet, or, rather, like an old hat, which it was." (from "The Bride of the Innisfallen")
This, to me, is equaled in English by Nabokov's terse clarity, and by little else; but it has been cited to me several times as unendurably cutesy or simply overwritten. I so completely disagree that it's hard to credit the opinion-havers with a shred of taste; however, there are tastes, and there are tastes, so I move on from my digression.
One Writer's Beginnings is told in a narrative voice much like her fiction; it is constructed like the linear tale that a life is when it is reflected on at leisure; and there are so many things in her history, from 1909 and her birth until her last entry in the lecture, a trip by train to New York during the Great Depression as a WPA junior publicity agent, that clearly formed a consciousness of time and place and rightness of things that she uses to such telling effect in her stories. An anecdote early in the book of her parents' morning routine of whistling and humming back and forth up and down the stairs phrases from "The Merry Widow Waltz" illuminates for me the means by which this shy, never-married lady "got" the signals of relationship that are so necessary to the parties in happiness. Another moment, the discovery of two nickels preserved in a hidden box, teaches me that Miss Eudora never felt any unmixed emotion (I won't tell that story, it must be read to be understood) and that is why The Ponder Heart is such a landmark in Southern ficiton.
The death of Miss Eudora's beloved father in 1931 is simply too painful for her to go into; she elides the details and leaves us to infer her pain. It fits with her lifelong lack of interest in talking about herself, but it leaves the reader without an anchor in what had to be a turbulent passage in her life. I can't fault the lady for her reticence, but in this as in several other areas, it would have behooved Miss Eudora to have let others guide her in preparing these talks so as to answer more questions:
It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.
Well, and therein the rub: It was the last thing she ever wanted to do, answer questions, and it's also why she wrote such marvelous stories, to answer them all unasked:
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
Miss Eudora Welty, thank you for all of it, and a safe journey into the future for your gifts to us who follow along behind you.
A beautifully written memoir of Welty's early life and family and how they shaped her writing. Wonderful insights into books and the importance of reading in early childhood. A must read!