Traditional “Southern Gentleman

8 Pages 1998 Words

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 the fathers as always being human and vulnerable, yet adored men on the edge of their daughter’s life (Westling 111). Although each of these three books depicts the traditional “Southern gentleman,” in The Ponder Heart, Welty chooses to parody the father character that she uses in One Writer’s Beginning and The Optimist’s Daughter.
In Welty’s autobiography, One Writer’s Beginning, she reminisces past experiences with her family, but more closely with her classic, Southern father. When reading this book, the reader visualizes a picture of Welty’s father wearing a suit to work everyday, putting in long hours at the office, and coming home to a nicely prepared dinner by his loving wife. The reader can then imagine Welty’s father finishing dinner ...