Optimist's Daughter

Eudora Welty's bittersweet account of the demise of an influential Southern gentleman and the effects of his death upon his family is one of my favorite books. Judge McKelva was a force to be reckoned with in the small town in Mississippi where he and his first wife raised their daughter. Laurel had long since left home to pursue a career in Chicago. When she returns for her father's last days and his funeral, she has to deal with the Judge's second wife. Fay is a painfully uncultured young woman who, Laurel begins to wonder, must have only seemed attractive to her father because of his loneliness and failing eyesight. By turns funny and moving. Ms. Welty is a towering presence even in an area of the country that has given America some of its best writers.

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mis-sissippi, in 1909. She was educated locally and at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Her short stories appeared in The Southern Review, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, and other magazines. She lectured at a number of colleges, held the William Allan Neilson professorship at Smith and the Lucy Donnelly Fellowship at Bryn Mawr, and was a lecturer at the Conference of American Studies at Cambridge University. She worked under grants from the Rockefeller and Merrill foundations and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and held a Guggenheim Fellow-ship. She was given honorary degrees from Smith, the University of Wisconsin, Western College for Women, Denison University, the University of the South at Sewanee, and Millsaps College in Jackson. She also received the M. Carey Thomas Award from Bryn Mawr, the Brandeis Medal of Achievement, and the Hollins Medal; her novel The Ponder Heart was awarded the Howells Medal for Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Eudora Welty died in 2001.


From the Hardcover edition.

This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations.

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Distributor: Random House, Inc.
Publication Date: 08-11-1990
Pages: 192
Measurements: 8in X 5.14in X .51in X .4375lb