100 Years of Welty
Lisa Spires
Scholars and literary fans will gather April 13 at the Georgia State Speakers Auditorium and the Rialto Center for the Arts to celebrate the life of one of the 20th century’s most beloved authors with all the traditional elements of a birthday celebration — cake, a toast and a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday to You.” The party is just one of a number of events planned at Georgia State and throughout the country to celebrate the 100th anniversary of author and photographer Eudora Welty’s birth. Welty passed away in 2001, but her work lives on in classrooms and book club circles around the world.
“Eudora Welty’s writing never really went out of fashion,” said Georgia State associate professor of English Pearl McHaney. “Her work has always been available in print, and it’s been reprinted many times in new paperback editions and Vintage International editions, and so she’s always been available and always been appreciated by both a popular and a scholarly audience. Plus, she’s not really a regional writer, so she’s not tied to this particular region. Of course, she’s from the South, but she’s writing about human relationships, and we all have those.”
On April 13, Georgia State will also be hosting Daniele Pitavy-Souques, who will give the Eudora Welty Centennial Lecture. Pitavy-Souques is an internationally-known Welty scholar and professor at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France.
“She’s going to talk about Eudora Welty, inspired child of her times, and that will be wonderful,” McHaney said.
The centennial celebration will focus on Welty not only as a writer — her photographic work will also be on display at the Rialto from March 30 through May 22. It’s a side of the author that some audiences may not be familiar with. McHaney recently published “Eudora Welty as Photographer,” a collection of 40 photographs, 30 of which have never before been available in print.
In the 1930s, Welty was a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, traveling all over Mississippi and writing small articles for county weeklies. On her travels, she carried a camera and took photographs of the people she met. McHaney’s book examines the ways in which Welty tried to grow as a photographer.
“My point is to have us look at these new photographs and see both the narrative quality that we’ve come to expect and to also see the more formal qualities, such as shadow, line or foregrounding, pattern, and to look at these anew,” she said. “Had things turned out differently, we might be writing a book about Eudora Welty as fiction writer, because she would have been a famed photographer.”
McHaney also recently published “Occasions: Selected Writings by Eudora Welty,” which brings together lesser-known pieces that were published in magazines or newspapers, as well as stories that hadn’t been included in other Welty collections. The book features a piece in which Welty looks back at writing her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, “The Optimist’s Daughter,” written after the deaths of Welty’s mother and brother.
“One of the ways she dealt with that grief was writing ‘The Optimist’s Daughter,’” said McHaney. “We don’t often get an author commenting to that extent on her own work.”
McHaney is editor of the Eudora Welty Newsletter, which transitions next month from a biannual newsletter to an annual peer-reviewed journal. The inaugural issue of the Eudora Welty Review will reprint 27 essays that have appeared in the Newsletter over the past 32 years.
“We’ve gone to more and more scholarly essays,” McHaney said. “I thought that the centennial would be a good time to move forward and to publish a journal. I think that Welty studies deserve that.”
For more information on the Eudora Welty centennial celebration, call the Georgia State University Department of English at 404-413-5800.