April 13, 1909 - July 23, 2001

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi and attended the public schools there.  She published several pieces in magazines for children before she reached her teens.  From 1925-1927, she attended Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, but transferred for her final two years of college to the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  She spent an academic year in New York City, studying at the Columbia University School of Business but attending lectures, plays, concerts, and art exhibitions as well. The untimely death of her father in 1931 prompted her return to Jackson, where she worked for radio and newspapers.  In 1935 and 1936, she worked for Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA), traveling to many parts of Mississippi taking photographs. In 1936 she published her first important short story, and from that time onward her writing career expanded and found considerable success, including the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.  Her stories are very much created by her own art out of materials she found and was touched by, material assembled by the artist's eye.  She died in 2001 in Jackson.

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