This novel of a Mississippi family in the 1920s “presents the essence of the Deep South and does it with infinite finesse” (The Christian Science Monitor). From one of the most treasured American writers, winner of a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, comes Delta Wedding, a vivid and charming portrait of Southern life. Set in 1923, the story is centered on the Fairchilds, a big and clamorous family, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. They are in the midst of planning their daughter’s wedding when a nine-year-old relative, Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, comes to visit. Drama leads to drama, revelation to revelation, in a novel that is “nothing short of wonderful” (The New Yorker). The result is a sometimes-riotous view of a Southern family, and the parentless child who learns to become one of them.
Presenting the first full-length collection of essays on Eudora Welty's novel, Delta Wedding (1946), this volume is the fourth book in Rodopi Press's Dialogue Series. Within these pages, emerging and experienced literary critics engage in an exciting dialogue about Welty's noted novel, presenting a wide range of scholarship that focuses on feminist concerns, pays tribute to the rhetoric of exclusion and empowerment, examines the role of outsider and boundaries, explores meaning-making, and highlights the novel's humor and musicality. This volume will no doubt be of interest to Welty aficianados as well as southern studies and feminist scholars and to those who are interested in the craft of writing fiction.
“A wonderful tragicomedy” of a Mississippi family, a vast inheritance, and an impulsive heir, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Delta Wedding (The New York Times). Daniel Ponder is the amiable heir to the wealthiest family in Clay County, Mississippi. To friends and strangers, he’s also the most generous, having given away heirlooms, a watch, and so far, at least one family business. His niece, Edna Earle, has a solution to save the Ponder fortune from Daniel’s mortifying philanthropy: As much as she loves Daniel, she’s decided to have him institutionalized. Foolproof as the plan may seem, it comes with a kink—one that sets in motion a runaway scheme of mistaken identity, a hapless local widow, a reckless wedding, a dim-witted teenage bride, and a twist of dumb luck that lands this once-respectable Southern family in court to brave an embarrassing trial for murder. It’s become the talk of Clay County. And the loose-tongued Edna Earle will tell you all about it. “The most revered figure in contemporary American letters,” said the New York Times of Eudora Welty, which also hailed The Ponder Heart—a winner of the William Dean Howells Medal which was adapted into both a Broadway play and a PBS Masterpiece series—as “Miss Welty at her comic, compassionate best.”
Inspired by memories of her beloved grandmother, photographer and author Alysia Burton Steele -- picture editor on a Pulitzer Prize-winning team -- combines heart-wrenching narrative with poignant photographs of more than 50 female church elders in the Mississippi Delta. These ordinary women lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and during the courageous changes of the Civil Rights Movement. With the help of local pastors, Steele recorded these living witnesses to history and folk ways, and shares the significance of being a Black woman -- child, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in Mississippi -- a Jewel of the Delta. From the stand Mrs. Tennie Self took for her marriage to be acknowledged in the phone book, to the life-threatening sacrifice required to vote for the first time, these 50 inspiring portraits are the faces of love and triumph that will teach readers faith and courage in difficult times.
A collection of short stories from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of classic American southern literature. Combining stories set in the rural south, Eudora Welty’s own special province, and stories with a European locale, which give a wider range to her fiction, The Bride of Innisfallen demonstrates the remarkable talent of one of the finest short story writers of our time. The gentle wit of the title story, the grave and musical prose of “Circe,” a retelling of Greek myth, the acute character portrayal and extraordinary evocation of the steamy bayou county in “No Place for You, My Love” are all touched with the particular magic that has made Welty one of America’s most beloved storytellers. “The writing throughout is at Ms. Welty’s best level.” —Edward Weeks, The Atlantic
Meet Delta Burke - beloved star of Designing Women, accomplished actress, founding partner of Delta Burke Design, a sassy, glamorous actress for whom learning to live as a "real-size" woman has presented all kinds of opportunities. A beauty-pageant winner, Delta had a much publicized weight gain during Designing Women and was the subject of press speculation and gossip. But as she started to come to terms with the fact that her body would always be full figured, she found her fans loved her all the more, and the outpouring of support began to compensate for the emotional strain. With wit, honesty, and directness, she discusses the pain she felt, her agonizing efforts to achieve a size 6 body, and her own journey to self-acceptance, which led her to found Delta Burke Design, a clothing company for the real-size woman. Filled with inspirational motivational advice, humorous anecdotes, and style tips from this nationally adored celebrity, Delta Style shows how positive thinking can transform your state of mind and give you the confidence to live up to your own - ond only your own - expectations. Beautiful Delta is a perfect role model for the millions of women who find coping with a real-size body requires strategy and acceptance, as will as for those coptivated by her screen presence and smart, upbeat approach to life.
Stories as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. These stories are honest, and vastly entertaining.
Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness. Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes a classic fairy tale and turns it into a novel set along the eighteenth-century frontier of the Natchez Trace. In the clammy forests of Louisiana, somewhere between New Orleans and the muddy Mississippi River, the berry-stained bandit of the woods, Jamie Lockhart, saves the life of a gullible planter. In reward, Jamie is given shelter—only to kidnap the planter’s lovely young daughter, Rosamund. It’s an impulsive act that will have far-reaching consequences, and will set in motion a series of fantastic, murderous, and flamboyantly uncivilized romantic adventures. With legendary figures of Mississippi’s past—including notorious riverboatman Mike Fink and the thrill-killing Harp brothers—mingling side-by-side with characters from legendary fairy tales and the author’s own imagination, The Robber Bridegroom in an exuberant cocktail of fantasy, folklore and history along the treacherous Natchez Trace. The basis of the popular musical that has run both on and off Broadway, The Robber Bridegroom is “a modern fairy tale, where irony and humor, outright nonsense, deep wisdom and surrealistic extravaganzas becomes a poetic unity through the power of a pure exquisite style” (The New York Times). “As sly and irresistible as anything in Candide. For all her wild, rich fancy, Welty writes prose that is as disciplined as it is beautiful.” —The New Yorker
