E is for Eudora--that's Miss Welty to you...

Eudora Welty wrote lit fic mostly, but my two favorite books of hers are The Robber Bridegroom, which is sort of a fairy tale based on the Grimm fairy tale, and The Ponder Heart, a hilarious book about "Uncle Daniel Ponder," a wealthy old man who ends up on trial for the alleged murder of his white trash teenage bride.  It's a short book, barely more than a novella, and it's got a lot to say about family,  a topic that also was at the heart of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Optimist's Daughter, which was published 42 years ago.

The Robber Bridegroom was turned into a Broadway musical in 1975 starring Barry Bostwick as the title character. The book and lyrics were written by Alfred Uhry (himself a Pulitzer Prize winner) and the music by Robert Waldman.  The show is popular in high schools, and you can find the original cast album here.

Eudora was one of a generation of writers who defined what's now called "Southern Literature." She was born 12 years after William Faulkner, and 15 years before Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote.If you enjoy regional literature, you really should check her out.

Feminist Fiction Friday--Miss Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1973 novel, The Optimist's Daughter. Ten years after her death and almost 40 years after it was published, you can buy a digital copy of The Optimist's Daughter with one click. I hope she'd be pleased. She was a woman ahead of her times in so many ways, I'd like to think she would have embraced the ebook revolution.
The Optimist's Daughter was my introduction to the writer. My mother was reading it at the same time her father's long and painful final illness was coming to an end, and she found it almost unbearable to read.
I didn't have the same personal, viscderal connection to the material, so my reading was an entirely different experience.
It's not a novel with a lot of plot but her characters...her characters were so real and rich and right, that I knew her work was going to set the bar for me in my first fumbling attempts at writing my own stories.
Miss Welty (and such was the force of her personality, that even her most ferocious fans felt self-conscious about first-naming her) began, as so many novelists do, writing short stories.
Two of those stories, "Death of a Traveling Salesman" and "Why I Live at the P.O." should be required reading for anyone who wants to practice short fiction.
Shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, The Robber Bridegroom came to the city on its way to Broadway.  An adaptation of Miss Welty's novella of the same name, a romantic fable based on real-life stories of robbers who used to ply their trade along the Natchez Trace. (Miss Welty was from Mississippi.), it was a musical with book by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and music by Robert Waldman.
I saw the play five times, which probably had more to do with my appreciation of Barry Bostwick, who played the title role, than my love for Southern literature, but the play was charming. (And if you know Bostwick only as the bombastic mayor in Spin City or as Brad in Rocky Horror Picture Show, here's a clip of him performing "Fathers and Sons"  in the Studs Terkel musical Working.)