J Keistler 2008-04-08

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

There are terrific reviews already on this site, and I can add little to what has already been said. I've been a Welty fan since discovering her work 40 years ago, and have a reply from her from many, many years ago when I wrote her a rather gushing fan letter in grade school.

I suppose that, like many Welty fans, I concentrated on her work. I'd read peripherally about her friendship with Porter and others, and I've enjoyed her photographic work. I'd also read One Writer's Beginnings. However, this work goes much deeper into Miss Welty's personal life than I'd been exposed to before. Who can say what's tragic or sad in another's life? We all create our existence to different muses.

I was delighted to find this book, and appreciate Ms. Marrs's scholarship.

Kevin Killian 2006-12-12

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

I like Suzanne Marrs' book but it is less a conventional biography than an annotated account of every social visit and trip abroad taken by Eudora Welty during her eighty plus years of living.

Welty seemed to enjoy her reputation as an outsider artist, and from her Mississippi roots she took strength, but she sure was connected to the bigtime power brokers of New York and London. No wonder her career took off so early. If your best friends were Mary Lou Aswell, the premiere fiction editor of the day, and oh, William and Emmy Maxwell, the NEW YORKER fiction editor and his wealthy wife, your career would skyrocket too. She won them all over with a winning combination of direct honesty, Southern charm, a real curiosity about the lives of others, and a nose for showing up all the right parties. Marrs shows us a Welty obsessed as Paris Hilton with making the rounds and being seen everywhere, and if you took out all the parties, dinners, and chic foreign travel, this giant biography would be about 80 pages. Elizabeth Bowen told British readers that DELTA WEDDING was "new" and "great," didn't mention their deep friendship. As one reads the book the spectacle of one hand washing the other, of sheer log rolling, is a living thing, frightening in its implications. First Welty created her own career, then it seemed to take over

And sad, sad, sad! If you credit Marrs' reading of Welty's life, she spent years pining after a man who turned out to be gay, and then when she was an old lady she fell in love with a fellow novelist, one married to yet a third. Pining away after Ross Macdonald (Ken Millar), she didn't care what people thought. She would give his books favorable reviews in the NEW YORK TIMES, why not? They dedicated books to each other and played out their celebrity romance in public, a mutual admiration society people enjoyed observing the way they liked to see Agatha Christie married to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, as two orders of celebrity drawn to each other like iron filings to a magnet. Was Millar in love with Welty? He told Reynolds Price he was. However, Marrs is big on "perhaps" (a word used over two hundred forty times in her biography) and it's hard to pin her down. The thrust of Marr's biography is to utterly destroy what's left of the reputation on Margaret Millar, the brilliant crime writer Ross Macdonald stayed married to. It's as if I was writing a biography of Angelina Jolie and felt compelled to obliterate poor Jennifer Aniston by concentrating solely on her bad habits and not on her possibly hurt feelings. When Welty hears the news that Margaret Millar has finally died, her response is terse and grim. "'Thank you for the information,' was Eudora's only reply."

Marrs, an academic working in Mississippi loved Eudora herself and by her own admission became one of her best young friend. And hence she might be chary of saying anything analytical or remotely critical about Welty. Unseemly is the number of pages she spends demolishing a previous biographer who had the temerity to call Welty "homely." It's pathetic that Marrs should have found it necessary to insist on Welty's good looks. I'm sorry, but if Ann Waldron's book may have suffered from a lack of cooperation from Welty's friends, at least it tried to penetrate the surface of America's best loved author. Too many friends will obscure the real subject of a biography, as well as too little. The one place where Marrs' book is compelling is in the slow, detailed analysis of Welty's last 30 years and how she wound up in a nightmare of being unable to write fiction. Surrounded by sycophants and scholars who, by the 1970s, had established a Eudora Welty industry, she lived in a state of denial, accepting by Marrs' count 39 honorary degrees in part, or so it seems, to reassure herself that she was universally adored. She had trouble saying no, and she'd go to the opening of an envelope. It was a terrible waste, and yet, what else could she do to find a scrap of happiness? She had to know people loved her. Scholars and helpers wound up keeping her name in the public eye by compiling new books of her own writings, publishing limited editions of her juvenilia, having her sign limited edition copies, and arranging for numerous TV interviews.

Occasionally Marrs lets the "beloved" mask slip and shows us glimpses of what might have been the real Welty. Her unexplained hatred of Martha Gellhorn--that "phony"--is one such opening. Or when Bill Maxwell, exasperated by Welty's whining, asks her how she could possibly be "broke" when she has a musical running on Broadway. Marrs has an empathic, eccentric style of her own, given to oratorical repetition. "This is not to say that Eudora had become a pacifist. She had not." Sometimes she seems to have an axe to grind herself. What's the point in demonizing the late Norma Brickell, for example, referring to her offhandedly, without a single citation, as a "notoriously dominating personality"? Could it be that Eudora resented Norma for having married Herschel Brickell, one of Welty's platonic boyfriends? If so, why not say so? Norma Brickell is unjustly maligned here and no one is going to speak up on her behalf. It wasn't Norma who voted against Eudora getting her nth Guggenheim--no, it was Herschel, "because, as he put it, "Them as has gits."

I hope that Marrs will devote her energies on Welty's behalf to the extent of preparing editions of the two abandoned novel projects that caused her idol so much suffering, the novel called "Nicotiana" or "The Last of the Figs," and the 70s rape revenge tale she refers to as "The Shadow Club." It would be a shame indeed if none of this material was made available to Welty's vast public. Look how Hemingway's estate authorized the publication of novel after novel, after Hemingway's suicide. Spruced up and with forewords by Richard Ford or Reynolds Price, we'd have a new couple of Welty bestsellers on our hands.

Janet Riehl 2006-06-14

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Solid research by a top Eudora Welty scholar is coupled here with close friendship in the last 15 years of Welty's long life. Suzanne Marrs friendship with Welty gave her unparalleled access to papers and a wide circle of Eudora Welty's friends.

In addition to the text there is a delightful section of 16 pages of photos ranging from Welty's childhood through old age--including a few she took herself.

Welty emerges from the pages of Marrs' biography as a woman engaged in the world--not sheltered from it as the popular myth of her life suggested. Even during the years of her so-called Writer's Block, she traveled widely and worked hard to craft and deliver speeches at colleges and universities that are later gathered into essays.

I was particularly touched by the passages relating to her involvement in taking care of her mother in old age and of how she strove--ultimately not for publication--to transform her pain at Ken Millar's (aka Ross Macdonald) Alzheimer's.

Although she grieved as close friends died, Eudora Welty also seems a wonderful model for vigorous aging as she kept active, involved, tried new things, and kept a cadre of acquaintances of all ages in her orbit.

--Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

armchairinterviews.com 2006-03-17

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909 and died July 23, 2001. She was a Southern woman and that simple fact was what initially brought her to my attention so many years ago. I so enjoy the Southern writer. And Eudora Welty is no exception. Welty is a critically acclaimed writer of essays, short stories and novels. Hers are the stories that I return to every so often, always finding something new in them.

Welty's 1984 memoir One Writer's Beginning was her own personal life account. And while that was interesting it is this biography that seems to fill in the blanks with substance; probably because the author had a distance Welty didn't. What I found most interesting is the author's ability to humanize this icon of literature. Welty was first and foremost a woman who though she had an extreme talent, enjoyed humor, loved deeply (even though she never married), had numerous friends (many who were writers), loved her mother (whom people thought dominated Welty) and thought of New York as her second home.

Welty was definitely not the "old maid" some thought she was. She fell in love with a man who cared for her but also was interested in men. She then lost in love with a married man who was stricken with Alzheimer's. But it was the long-term relationship with Kenneth Millar (detective fiction writer Ross Macdonald) that will make your heart skip a beat. They met at the Algonquin Hotel and corresponded with each other twice each month. They only spent a total of six weeks together over the years but they always believed that fate brought them together.

I enjoyed the small items in this book: that Welty admired Langston Hughes's poetry and that osteoporosis took six inches from her five-foot-ten height. Especially touching are the memories of the relationship with Ken Millar.

Marrs book is a complete, considerate and grand account of the life of an important American literary icon. It is a book that I will revisit just like her body of work. Armchair Interviews says her work, like her biography is something to be read, reread and savored.

John Matlock 2005-09-14

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

There seems to be something provincial about any writer that lives in Mississippi. They cannot be viewed as normal people. When they are female, far from beautiful, remain unmarried, somewhat sequestered, a name like Eudora, and live with their mother, the image comes unbidden of a demure Southern Lady, incapable of expressing emotion, if they have any. Eudora Welty fit this image perfectly, and because she did it is too easy to dismiss her writing as worthless.

Then you look at the prizes:Pulitzer, National Book, eight (yes 8) O. Henry's, National Medal of Literature, Medal of Freedom. There had to be something more behind the image, something of life to give the understanding for such insight.

Ms. Marrs biography does an excellent job of giving life to Eudora Welty. That she considered New York her alternate home. That she was for integration in a segregationist South. That the loves in her life happened to be unavailable, but that they indeed were there.

Ms. Marrs book provides a view of Eudora Welty that rounds out her life in a most plesant way.