Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America)

ISBN: 188301154X

Author: Welty, Eudora

Condition: New

One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, Eudora Weltys novels and stories blend the storytelling tradition of the South with a modernist sensibility attuned to the mysteries and ambiguities of experience. In this Library of America volume and its companion, Welty explores the complex abundance of southern, and particularly Southern womens, lives with an artistry that Salman Rushdie has called impossible to overpraise. In a career spanning five decades, she chronicled her own Mississippi with a depth and intensity matched only by William Faulkner.Complete Novels gathers all of Weltys longer fiction in one volume for the first time. In The Robber Bridegroom (1942), based on a Grimm fairy tale, legendary figures from Mississippis past, such as the keel-boat captain Mike Fink and the savage outlaws the Harp Brothers, mingle with Weltys own imaginings in a free-ranging and boisterous fantasy set along the Natchez Trace.The richly textured Delta Wedding (1946), set against a backdrop of rural Mississippi in the 1920s, vividly portrays the intricacies of family relationships in its account of the sprawling Fairchild clan-with their family trait of quick, upturning smiles, instant comprehension of the smallest eddy of life in the current of the day, which would surely be entered in a kind of reckless pleasure-and their Delta plantation Shellmound.Edna Earle Ponders unrestrained and delightfully absurd monologue, superb in its capturing of the rhythms of country speech, shows Weltys humor at its idiomatic best in The Ponder Heart (1954), a flight of invention culminating in a murder trial that becomes an occasion for exuberant comedy.The monumental Losing Battles (1970), composed over fifteen years, brings Weltys imaginative gifts to the largest canvass of her career, rendering a Depression-era family reunion with mythic scope and ebullient comic vigor.The volume concludes with The Optimists Daughter (1972), a taut and moving story of a woman rediscovering the world of her childhood as she comes to terms with her fathers death. Often considered her masterpiece, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1972.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, Americas best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.