One Writer's Beginnings

By: Eudora Welty

Narrated by: Eudora Welty

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s timeless lectures that became a New York Times best-selling classic regarded as a “profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write” (Los Angeles Times).

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. Everyday 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 backcountry that became 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.

In her vivid descriptions of growing up in the South - of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the children they taught - she recreates the vanished world of her youth with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction, capturing “the mysterious transfiguring gift by which dream, memory, and experience become art” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

Part memoir, part exploration of the seeds of creativity, these lectures recorded at Harvard in 1983 offer a rare glimpse into the Mississippi childhood that made Eudora Welty the acclaimed and important writer she would become.

©1983, 1984 Eudora Welty. ©2020 Eudora Welty LLC. All rights reserved. Introduction copyright ©2020 Natasha Trethewey. Excerpt(s) from The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty, copyright ©1969, 1972 Eudora Welty. Used by permission of Random House (P)2020 Simon & Schuster Audio

Lovely Miss Eudora Herself!

For any fan of the amazing Eudora Welty, this title is a breath of fresh air. What a brilliant and insightful lady she was!

Life changing

This is totally transcendent!!!! I’ve loved her work, but never heard her own point of view.

wonderful

wonderful
have reread and enjoyed the presentation
reading historical fiction is a powerful story. thank you

Recording does not align with published version

A gorgeous work, and so tenderly read by Welty, but the recording comprises a series of lectures she gave as opposed to the book's version of the memoir. While they overlap, they are not identical. Thought this might be useful for readers/listeners to know.

A must listen!

Hearing Eudora Welty read was such a treat! I highly recommend. Just 3 hours … unfortunately

Fantastic listen!

The audio was recorded and preserved very well, even better than a lot of modern works on Audible. Eudora’s lecture series is in three parts, each made up of excerpts of her own work. Her speaking voice matches her writing and is an absolute joy to listen to. Inspiring and entertaining.