Eudora Alice Welty was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer, who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi, has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum.
Byron De La Beckwith Jr. was an American white supremacist and Klansman from Greenwood, Mississippi, who assassinated the civil rights leader Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. Two trials in 1964 on that charge, with all-white Mississippi juries, resulted in hung juries. In 1994, he was tried by the state in a new trial based on new evidence, convicted of the murder by a mixed jury, and sentenced to life in prison.
Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-three novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail," her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."
Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction in American literature that takes place in the American South.
"The Robber Bridegroom" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 40. Joseph Jacobs included a variant, Mr Fox in English Fairy Tales, but the original provenance is much older; Shakespeare alludes to the Mr. Fox variant in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1:
The Optimist's Daughter is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning short novel by Eudora Welty. It was first published as a long story in The New Yorker in March 1969 and was subsequently revised and published in book form in 1972. It concerns a woman named Laurel, who travels to New Orleans to take care of her father, Judge McKelva, after he has surgery for a detached retina. Judge McKelva fails to recover from this surgery, and as he dies slowly in the hospital, Laurel visits and reads to him from Dickens. Her father's second wife, Fay, who is younger than Laurel, is a shrewish outsider from Texas. Her shrill response to the Judge's illness appears to accelerate his demise. Laurel and Fay are thrown together when they return the Judge to his hometown, Mount Salus, Mississippi, where he will be buried. There, Laurel is immersed in the good neighborliness of the friends and family she knew before marrying and moving away to Chicago. Fay, though, has always been unwelcome and leaves for a long weekend, leaving Laurel in the big house full of memories. Laurel encounters her mother's memory, her father's life after he lost his first wife, and the complex emotions surrounding her loss as well as the many memories. She comes to a place of understanding that Fay can never share, and she leaves small town Mississippi with the memories she can carry with her.
"A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty is a short story about an elderly African American woman who undertakes a familiar journey on a road in a rural area to acquire medicine for her grandson. She expresses herself, both to her surroundings and in short spurts of spoken monologue, warning away animals and expressing the pain she feels in her weary bones.
The World's Finest Team was a fictional DC Comics superhero team who first appeared in the DC Comics Dollar Comics format series in World's Finest Comics #244, created by Gerry Conway, with art by Jim Aparo and George Tuska. The team consisted of the Silver Age versions of Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, and Black Canary, along with the new, original Wonder Woman of Earth-Two.
The Eudora Welty House at 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson, Mississippi was the home of author Eudora Welty for nearly 80 years. It was built by her parents in 1925. In it she did all her writing, in an upstairs bedroom. Welty and her mother built and tended the garden over decades. The house was first declared a Mississippi Landmark in 2001, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, and declared a National Historic Landmark in 2004. This was part of a raised awareness of the significance of authors and literary life in the United States.
"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is a short story written by the American writer Katherine Anne Porter. It was published in 1930 as part of Porter's short story collection Flowering Judas, and Other Stories.
Ann Wood Waldron was an American author who initially focused on writing for children and young adults, then turned to biographies of authors from the South, and ultimately shifted in her late seventies to writing murder mysteries set at Princeton University.
The National Book Award for Fiction is one of five annual National Book Awards, which recognize outstanding literary work by United States citizens. Since 1987 the awards have been administered and presented by the National Book Foundation, but they are awards "by writers to writers". The panelists are five "writers who are known to be doing great work in their genre or field".
The Ponder Heart is a novella written by Eudora Welty and illustrated by Joe Krush, originally published in The New Yorker in 1953, and republished by Harcourt Brace in 1954. The plot of The Ponder Heart follows Daniel Ponder, a wealthy heir, and is told through the narration of Edna Earle Ponder, Daniel's niece. In 1956, the story was made into a Broadway play by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov. Una Merkel won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her portrayal of Edna Earle Ponder in the Broadway play.
Marcella Comès Winslow was an American photographer and portrait painter. She was the official portrait painter of the United States Poet Laureate.
"Why I Live at the P.O." is a short story written by Eudora Welty, American writer and photographer. It was published in her collection of stories named A Curtain of Green (1941). The work was inspired by a photograph taken by Welty that depicts a woman ironing at the back of a post office. The story is classified as an example of Southern realism. "Why I Live at the P.O." is one of Welty's most popular and frequently anthologized stories.
Ethel Wright Mohamed was an American artist, best known for her embroidered scenes of country life. She is sometimes compared to "Grandma Moses," both for her folk art style of illustration and her late start as an artist.
Losing Battles is the last novel written by Eudora Welty. It was released on April 13, 1970. The novel's setting is two days—a Sunday and Monday morning—in a 1930s farm in Mississippi. Losing Battles was her first novel to make the best seller lists, to the surprise of Welty.
The literature of Mississippi, United States, includes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Mississippi has a literary tradition that arise from a diverse mix of cultures and races. Traditional themes from this genre of literature lean towards the past, conflict and change, and southern history in general; however, in the modern era, work have shifted towards deeply Southern works that do not rely on these traditional themes.
"Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" is a short story written by American writer, Eudora Welty. It is included in Welty's first collection of short stories A Curtain of Green. Critics have found it possible for Welty to have been influenced by fairy tales, folklore and or nursery rhymes when writing this story, as there are elements of each within this piece. "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" is speculated to fit anywhere in the classification system from grimly comedic to documentary realism or literary allegory.
