One Writer's Imagination

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 and the writer's personal reactions to the issues of her day. In doing so, Marrs proves Welty to be a much more political artist than has been conventionally thought.
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.