After high school, I set out on a mission to improve my literary education. Starting with easy classics like The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises I ventured into more difficult novels like Crime and Punishment, The Plague, and The Trial. By my early thirties, I had rediscovered the "short story" and reacquainted myself with my nemesis and master of the form – Eudora Welty!
I know now why I couldn't identify at the age of 16 with Welty's simple stories of families and relationships, or her similes and metaphors. I just wasn't ready or prepared in life for her, her wisdom and her poetic vision of small town life.
During her lifetime, she composed scores of short stories, six novels and an autobiography. She also received 24 major awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In her later years she was plagued with arthritis, an inherited illness, and loss of hearing. She said that her hearing loss was most difficult, since she had always drawn her characters from the simple conversations around her.
Eudora Welty continued to live in her family house in Jackson Mississippi until her death at age 92 in 2001.
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