Symposium and Concert Celebrates Southern Writer Eudora Welty

Photo by Kay Bell

Mississippi’s Eudora Welty remains one of America’s literary treasures.

A symposium and concert at Mississippi College on January 14 will celebrate Welty’s incredible gifts as an iconic Southern writer.

Leaders of the Arts Council of Clinton will sponsor the program “Inspirations by Welty” at the university’s Aven Fine Arts Building. The event that Saturday on the Clinton campus will feature speakers such as Welty scholars Suzanne Marrs and Elizabeth Crews.

A retired Millsaps College professor, Marrs authored “Eudora Welty: A Biography,” and other works about the distinguished Mississippian. Marrs serves as the Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at the Eudora Welty House in Jackson. Crews is a Blue Mountain College English professor.

Open to the public, the free symposium begins 2:30 p.m. at the Jean Pittman Williams Recital Hall. A concert led by singer/songwriters Claire Holley and Kate Campbell that evening at Swor Auditorium at 6 p.m. wraps up the salute to the much-heralded author. Tickets cost $20 for adults and $10 for students.

Miss Welty died in her hometown of Jackson in July 2001 at age 92.

Her literature touched readers MC English professor Steve Price. The MC Writing Center director first admired her works as an undergraduate in Wisconsin.

While he enjoyed Welty’s humor, there were other aspects of her life he soon discovered. “I came to learn that she was a person with grit, someone who knew the racial and class problems that existed in Jackson and in Mississippi,” Price noted. “She had an amazingly empathetic eye, as seen in her photographs. And she was willing to grapple with the social issues that surrounded her.”

MC English professor Susan Lassiter admires this “world renowned literary figure, who was foremost a Southern lady.”

Delightful Welty tales are endless across the South.

One of Lassiter’s professors, Betty Furstenberger of Hinds Community College, told the class of the time she and a friend camped out nearby the author’s Belhaven home. The college girls hoped to meet the literary giant. When Miss Eudora discovered the girls outside her home, she immediately invited them in for iced tea and cookies on a sweltering summer day. “Best of all, it was an afternoon of Welty’s observations and stories.”

The program at Mississippi College spotlighting one of the luminaries of American literature has much territory to cover.

Welty’s novel “The Optimist’s Daughter” landed her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1973. Her works include the 1954 novel “The Ponder Heart” that was transformed into a television film directed by Martha Coolidge. Welty penned the autobiographical “One Writer’s Beginnings” in 1984. A prolific writer, Welty produced “Delta Wedding” in 1946 and “The Robber Bridegroom,” a novella, in 1942, to name a few others.

Born on the Welty family estate on North Congress Street in Jackson in 1909, Welty attended Jackson’s Central High from 1921 through 1925. She spent two years as an undergraduate at Mississippi University for Women in Columbus from 1925 through 1927. She left the Magnolia State to earn her bachelor’s in English at the University of Wisconsin in 1929, during the Great Depression. Welty later attended business school at Columbia University in New York where she studied advertising.

After her father died in 1931, Welty returned home to Jackson, Mississippi and worked for a radio station in the capital city. A few years later, Eudora was employed by the federal Works Progress Administration as a publicist and photographer. Her stunning photos of life in the rural South amid the Great Depression were part of an exhibition in New York City in 1936.

Leaders of the symposium say they wish to communicate to the audience what it is about Welty’s writings and remarkable life that inspires people in literary circles.

The program on the Clinton campus brings other benefits as well.

“It will be a great opportunity for our students and other community members to see the way that literature, music and the arts all influence each other to produce striking works of creativity,” said MC Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences Jonathan Randle.

The Welty symposium and concert in early 2017 trumpets the partnership between Mississippi College and the City of Clinton.

To purchase concert tickets, go to www.artscouncilofclinton.org. For more information: contact Ricky Nations, president of the Arts Council of Clinton at 601-750-3052.