Unlike last year's Faulkner Centennial, which sparked little excitement beyond the Nobel laureate's native Mississippi and Faulkner scholars, the 90th birthday, on April 13, of Eudora Welty, also a Mississippian, is being celebrated with a lionizing feature by Willie Morris in May's Vanity Fair, amid a burst of activity in both the book and film worlds.
In fact, the Library of America began the celebration in October, with a two-volume collection of Welty's complete opus. Edited by Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling, the Eudora Welty set is the Library's first commemoration of a living author's work. Happily, it's turned out to be one of the greatest successes there to date, publisher Max Rudin told PW.
"Review and other media attention has been enormous, much more than our books usually receive, and all notably respectful," he said. From an initial printing of 27,000 copies for each $35 volume, 9000 sets have been sold via retail, 2500 through book clubs, and another 9000 through the Library's mail-order subscription program.
Notable, too, was the unusually large audience drawn to New York City's 92nd St. Y for the Library's launch event, an evening of readings of the honoree's stories by Ann Beattie, Ford, Randall Kenan, Karl Kirchwey (substituting for William Maxwell), Joyce Carol Oates and Elizabeth Spencer.
But sadly for Doubleday, that warm embrace didn't extend to Ann Waldron's Eudora, an unauthorized biography that reviewers and Welty enthusiasts alike saw as a mean-spirited invasion of her closely guarded privacy.
But the celebratory pace has picked up with the arrivals of two new Welty titles. Hill Street Press's trade paperback Eudora Welty: Writers Reflections Upon First Reading Welty (Apr.), compiled by Welty Newsletter editor Pearl Amelia McHaney, was complemented by 200 slipcased hardcovers in a limited $200 edition that pre-pub orders nearly exhausted. Several among McHaney's gathering of mostly Southern authors are headliners at the University of Mississippi's Oxford Conference on the Book, the Chattanooga Conference on Southern Literature in Tennessee and other Welty salutes scheduled for this month in bookstores across the South.
The University Press of Mississippi's The First Story (Mar.) pairs the original version of Welty's 1936 "Death of a Traveling Salesman" with a Georgia Review essay she wrote four decades later on that initially published work's evolution. UMiss's latest addition to its extensive list of books by and about Welty is limited to 500 numbered copies ($75), most of which are already sold.
In Jackson, Welty's hometown, both books are the centerpiece for a cake-and-champagne birthday celebration co-hosted by Mississippi's Bookfriends support group and local bookstore Lemuria. Store owner John Evans notes that the venerated author won't be present, however, since frail health keeps her housebound. Nonetheless, close friends who visit find her mentally alert, so perhaps she's aware that Sally Field's film option on her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Optimist's Daughter (Vintage, 1972), her last novel, is finally being activated.
According to J Regal, who handles film rights at Russell &Volkening, where Welty has long been a client, production is currently set at Disney, and completion of a script by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) indicates it may soon begin.
Two television adaptations are also underway. In January, L.A.-based ALT Films begins production of The Ponder Heart for PBS's Mobil Theater's American Collection, with Earl Hammer, creator of The Waltons and Falcon Crest, as producer and script consultant. And CBS acquired film rights to Delta Wedding last fall.
But Rudin cautioned against seeing this diverse birthday groundswell as a Welty revival. After all, he said, interest in the prototypical Southern writer "never went away. More accurately, it is an increased recognition that among writers she is our greatest living legend."
