Book #33 One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty
“As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
This is the third, and the last, of the local summer reading list book which I wanted to dive into this season. I remember this volume had gone out of print until Eudora Welty’s death rekindled an interest in her work. After having wanted to read it for quite some time, I rather enjoyed myself with this one. Welty focused more on her family, specifically her parents, than on writing but the way she wove how the elements of her childhood into the end product of her work was intriguing.
I also noticed that both she and Harper Lee were quite well educated. Lee was almost a law school graduate when she dropped out to pursue writing, and Welty attended graduate school at Columbia for her business degree. There goes my damned daydreams of being able to write undereducated masterpieces from a damp room in the back of a rural post office.
Overall, I was quite smitten with it – much more so than Dillard’s “The Writing Life” which one teacher chose to replace this one. (No matter how similar they might seem on the surface I would never compare them to each other otherwise.) Such sadness!
