Books by Suzanne Marrs
Eudora Welty: A Biography
Eudora Welty's works are treasures of American literature. When her first short-story collection was published in 1941, it heralded the arrival of a genuinely original writer who over the decades wrote hugely popular novels, novellas, essays, and a memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, that became a national bestseller. By the end of her life, Welty (who died in 2001) had been given nearly every literary award there was and was all but shrouded in admiration.
In this definitive and authoritative account, Suzanne Marrs restores Welty's story to human proportions, tracing Welty's life from her roots in Jackson, Mississippi, to her rise to international stature. Making generous use of Welty's correspondence-particularly with contemporaries and admirers, including Katherine Anne Porter, E. M. Forster, and Elizabeth Bowen-Marrs has provided a fitting and fascinating tribute to one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.
Copies
No copies available.
Eudora Welty: A Biography
Eudora Welty's works are treasures of American literature. When her first short-story collection was published in 1941, it heralded the arrival of a genuinely original writer who over the decades wrote hugely popular novels, novellas, essays, and a memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, that became a national bestseller. By the end of her life, Welty (who died in 2001) had been given nearly every literary award there was and was all but shrouded in admiration.
In this definitive and authoritative account, Suzanne Marrs restores Welty's story to human proportions, tracing Welty's life from her roots in Jackson, Mississippi, to her rise to international stature. Making generous use of Welty's correspondence-particularly with contemporaries and admirers, including Katherine Anne Porter, E. M. Forster, and Elizabeth Bowen-Marrs has provided a fitting and fascinating tribute to one of the finest writers of the twentieth century.
Copies
No copies available.
What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell
Eavesdrop on one of the most celebrated literary friendships in American letters
"An epistolary feast for literary fans [and] a confidence booster for aspiring writers everywhere. A–" —Entertainment Weekly
"If friendship is an art, this volume is its masterpiece." —Lee Smith
"A remarkable testimony to friendship, literature, and an abiding love of life." —Richmond Times-Dispatch
What There Is to Say We Have Said bears witness to Welty and Maxwell’s more than fifty years of friendship and their lives as writers and readers. It serves as a chronicle of their literary world, their talk of Katherine Anne Porter, Salinger, Dinesen, Updike, Percy, Cheever, and more. Through more than three hundred letters, Marrs brings us the story of a true, deep friendship and an homage to the forgotten art of letter writing.
"A vivid picture of twentieth-century intellectual life and a record of a remarkable friendship... Glorious." —Houston Chronicle
"Full of great tidbits about The New Yorker back in the day ... Charming." —The New Yorker
"These letters evoke a lost world when events moved a bit more slowly, and friends could take the time to be both eloquently witty and generous with each other, and letters were unobtrusively artful about daily life. Welty and Maxwell are like two birds of the same species, calling to each other across the distances." —Charles Baxter
Copies
No copies available.
The Welty Collection: A Guide to the Eudora Welty Manuscripts and Documents at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
A valuable annotated listing that surveys the extensive collection of primary and secondary materials in the principal repository of Welty’s manuscripts, photographs, and related documents
Copies
-
$35.00
One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty (Southern Literary Studies)
In One Writer's Imagination, Suzanne Marrs draws upon nearly twenty years of conversations, interviews, and friendship with Eudora Welty to discuss the intersections between biography and art in the Pulitzer Prize winner's work. Through an engaging chronological and comprehensive reading of the Welty canon, Marrs describes the ways Welty's creative process transformed and transfigured fact to serve the purposes of fiction. She points to the sparks that lit Welty's imagination -- an imagination that thrived on polarities in her personal life and in society at large.
Marrs offers new evidence of the role Welty's mother, circle of friends, and community played in her development as a writer and analyzes the manner in which her most heartfelt relationships -- including her romance with John Robinson -- inform her work. She charts the profound and often subtle ways Welty's fiction responded to the crucial historical episodes of her time -- notably the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement -- and the writer's personal reactions to war, racism, poverty, and the political issues of her day. In doing so, Marrs proves Welty to be a much more political artist than has been conventionally thought.
Scrutinizing drafts of Welty's work, Marrs reveals an evolving pattern of revision increasingly significant to the author's thematic concerns and precision of style. Welty's achievement, Marrs explains, confirms theories of creativity even as it transcends them, remaining in its origins somewhat mysterious.
Marrs's relationship to Eudora Welty as a friend, scholar, and archivist -- with access to private papers and restricted correspondence -- makes her a unique authority on Welty's forty-year career. The eclectic approach of her study speaks to the exhilarating power of imagination Welty so thoroughly enjoyed in the act of writing.
Copies
No copies available.
Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald
A 2016 Edgar Award finalist, the intimate, luminous portrait of a friendship” of two American literary icons (Kirkus, starred review).
In 1970, Ross Macdonald wrote a letter to Eudora Welty, beginning a thirteen-year correspondence between fellow writers and kindred spirits. Though separated by background, geography, genre, and his marriage, the two authors shared their lives in witty, wry, tender, and at times profoundly romantic letters, each drawing on the other for inspiration, comfort, and strength. They brought their literary talents to bear on a wide range of topics, discussing each others' publications, the process of translating life into fiction, the nature of the writer’s block each encountered, books they were reading, and friends and colleagues they cherished. They also discussed the world around them, the Vietnam War, the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan presidencies, and the environmental threats facing the nation. The letters reveal the impact each had on the other’s work, and they show the personal support Welty provided when Alzheimer’s destroyed Macdonald’s ability to communicate and write.
The editors of this collection, who are the definitive biographers of these two literary figures, have provided extensive commentary and an introduction. They also include Welty’s story fragment Henry,” which addresses Macdonald’s disease. With its mixture of correspondence and narrative, Meanwhile There Are Letters provides a singular reading experience: a prose portrait of two remarkable artists and one unforgettable relationship.
Copies
No copies available.
Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald
*2016 Edgar Award Finalist*
*2016 Anthony Award Finalist*
*2016 Macavity Award Finalist*
In 1970, Ross Macdonald wrote a letter to Eudora Welty, beginning a thirteen-year correspondence between fellow writers and kindred spirits. Though separated by background, geography, genre, and his marriage, the two authors shared their lives in witty, wry, tender, and at times profoundly romantic letters, each drawing on the other for inspiration, comfort, and strength. They brought their literary talents to bear on a wide range of topics, discussing each others' publications, the process of translating life into fiction, the nature of the writer’s block each encountered, books they were reading, and friends and colleagues they cherished. They also discussed the world around them, the Vietnam War, the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan presidencies, and the environmental threats facing the nation. The letters reveal the impact each had on the other’s work, and they show the personal support Welty provided when Alzheimer’s destroyed Macdonald’s ability to communicate and write.
The editors of this collection, who are the definitive biographers of these two literary figures, have provided extensive commentary and an introduction. They also include Welty’s story fragment Henry,” which addresses Macdonald’s disease. With its mixture of correspondence and narrative, Meanwhile There Are Letters provides a singular reading experience: a prose portrait of two remarkable artists and one unforgettable relationship.
Copies
No copies available.