Occasions
Selected Writings
Occasions is a celebration of the short works of one of America’s most beloved writers. To mark the centennial of Eudora Welty’s birth, Pearl Amelia McHaney collected more than sixty pieces by Welty (1909–2001) that were largely unknown and had not been reprinted since their first appearances in magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers.
The gathering includes one of Welty’s earliest stories, “Acrobats in the Park”; a self-analysis of her art printed in the Twenty Photographs portfolio; a recipe for Aunt Beck’s Chicken Pie served up in the novel Losing Battles; and a parody of Edmund Wilson’s scurrilous New Yorker review of one of William Faulkner’s late novels. These occasional essays, tributes, stories, and comments will delight readers and reveal more of the genius of a favorite author deeply engaged with her people and their customs.
In these pieces Welty put pen to paper for just causes: electing honorable officials, selling war bonds, and promoting reading and the arts. Her sophistication and insight resonate in tributes to Isak Dinesen, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy; in reviews of sculpture, painting, dance, and photography; and in her candid remarks about her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Optimist’s Daughter. Her sly humor emerges in "Women!! Make Turban in Own Home!," a delightful parody of projects suggested in Popular Mechanics. Written between the 1930s and the 1990s, these fictions, essays, commemorations, reviews, and salutes reveal the sparkling imagination of a celebrated writer who continues her hold on a wide audience through these selections.
Eudora Welty (Author)
Eudora Welty is author of many novels and story collections, including The Optimist’s Daughter (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), Losing Battles, The Ponder Heart, The Robber Bridegroom, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, as well as three collections of her photographic work—Photographs, Country Churchyards, and One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
Pearl Amelia McHaney (Editor)
Pearl Amelia McHaney is Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature Emerita at Georgia State University and a recipient of the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award for outstanding achievement in Welty studies. She is author of A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty’s Nonfiction and Photography and editor of Eudora Welty as Photographer, Occasions: Selected Writingsby Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews, and A Writer’s Eye: Collected Reviews, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
