Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Robber Bridegroom | 1942 |
| Delta Wedding | 1946 |
| The Ponder Heart | 1954 |
| Losing Battles | 1970 |
| The Optimist’s Daughter | 1972 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| A Curtain of Green | 1941 |
| The Wide Net and Other Stories | 1943 |
| The Golden Apples | 1949 |
| The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories | 1955 |
| The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty | 1980 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| The Shoe Bird | 1964 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| One Time, One Place | 1971 |
| The Eye of the Story | 1978 |
| One Writer’s Beginnings | 1984 |
| Photographs | 1989 |
| A Writer’s Eye | 1994 |
| On Writing | 2002 |
| Some Notes on River Country | 2003 |
| On William Faulkner | 2003 |
| Occasions | 2009 |
About Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty (1909 to 2001) was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. She published five novels and more than forty short stories, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973 for “The Optimist’s Daughter”, and was the first living author to have her work published by the Library of America.
Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on 13 April 1909. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father an insurance executive. She studied at the Mississippi State College for Women and the University of Wisconsin, then took a course in advertising at Columbia University. She returned to Jackson in 1931, and from 1933 worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, collecting stories and taking photographs of daily life in Mississippi. Those pictures were later published as “One Time, One Place” and “Photographs”.
Her first story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman”, appeared in the magazine Manuscript in 1936. Her first collection, “A Curtain of Green”, followed in 1941 with a foreword by Katherine Anne Porter, and included “Why I Live at the P.O.”, “Petrified Man” and “A Worn Path”. Her first novel, “The Robber Bridegroom”, is a Southern fairy tale based loosely on the Brothers Grimm story of the same name, and was later turned into a Broadway musical. “The Ponder Heart”, first published in The New Yorker in 1953, was adapted as a Broadway play in 1956.
“The Optimist’s Daughter” began as a long story in The New Yorker in 1969 and was revised for book publication in 1972. It follows Laurel, who returns to Mississippi to look after her father, Judge McKelva, after an eye operation. “The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty” appeared in 1980, and its paperback edition won a National Book Award in 1983. Her one children’s book is “The Shoe Bird”.
“One Writer’s Beginnings”, a memoir of her Mississippi childhood based on three lectures she gave at Harvard in 1983, spent almost a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Welty received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. She lived in the family house in Jackson until her death on 23 July 2001, and the house is now a museum. A volume of her essays, “On Writing”, was published in 2002.