Book Review: One Writer’s Beginnings

 

 One Writer's Beginnings

by Eudora Welty

Scribner 

 Biographies & Memoirs 

Pub Date 03 Nov 2020 

I am reviewing a copy of One Writer’s Beginnings through Scribner and Netgalley:

Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson Mississippi and she died in 2001.  In this book Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well.   She talks about how everyday sights and sounds and objects resonated with her, everything from the striking of clocks, to the Victorla and her orphaned Fathers coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that became a metaphor for her mother’s sturdy independence.  She goes on to talk about how her earliest box camera allowed her to suspend a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture.

This book includes vivid descriptions of growing up in the south, the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, the relationship between dedicated school teachers and the students they taught.  she recreates the vanished world of her youth with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction, capturing “the mysterious transfiguring gift by which dream, memory, showing us how experience becomes art.

One Writer’s Beginnings is in part memoir, in part about exploring creativity and its seeds.  This book offers a glimpse into the Mississippi Childhood that allowed Eudora Welty to become the critically acclaimed and important author she would become.

I give One Writer’s Beginnings Five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!