Traditional_“Southern_Gentleman

Traditional “Southern Gentleman Eudora Welty: Traditional “Southern Gentleman” Eudora Alice Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi. Eudora Welty’s parents were born in the North, and after meeting and falling in love at college, they were married. Both of Welty’s parents wanted to move from their hometowns, but it was Welty’s mother who persuaded her newly wedded husband to “set off for a new life and a new part of the world for both of them, in Jackson, Mississippi” (Welty, One 57). The couple’s move proved to be an important influence on Eudora, as she would later become one of the South’s best-known authors (Giles 305). When Welty began writing she was able to intimately portray a Southern lifestyle, which caused many readers to extol her work (Schmitt 290). Welty received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Howells Medal in 1955 for one of her comic novels, The Ponder Heart, and in 1973 she received the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter (Giles 294). In 1984 Welty finished her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginning, which “spent forty-six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list” (Giles 317-318). In these three books, Welty portrays welty, welty’s, father, one, southern, optimist’s, ponder, uncle, traditional, man, mckelva, family, daughter, daniel, writer’s, public, judge, beginning, heart, love, life, town, phillips, gentleman, eudora, 13, support, money, characters, being, because, parody, out, hard, character