One Writer's Beginnings

Published in 1984, One Writer’s Beginnings is Eudora Welty’s memoir about her childhood and how she came to be a writer. Told through a series of vivid reminiscences about her past, the book’s main focus is memory, which Welty says is her most prized possession. She writes that in her memory every person and event in her life resides together in a place that is separate from time. The book is divided into three main sections: “Listening,” Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.”

The first section, “Listening,” begins with Welty’s earliest memories of her home in Jackson, Mississippi, moving through her childhood experiences as she learns to manage her emotions and gain independence from her mother. Having lost their own parents and their firstborn child, Welty’s parents were extremely overprotective. She even notes that her joy as a child was often tinged with guilt because such enjoyment often came at her mother’s expense, such as when she would leave home and her mother would become very anxious.

Welty states that the first thing she remembers learning to do was to listen—to the stories told and conversations had by her parents and her parents’ friends as they gossiped and talked about the latest town scandal. It was from these stories and conversations that she first learned a sense of scene. This pleasure in listening, says the author, also helped her to find an internal voice and gain the ability to view events with objectivity.



From an early age, the author tells the reader, she became very fond of books. Welty emphasizes that at this time her parents were very focused on their children’s education and greatly encouraged her to read. Her mother, she says, is very relieved when Welty makes the decision to become a writer because she thinks it will be a safe occupation. She notes that she borrows many books from the Carnegie Library, and though she enjoys reading the Bible, she is not very interested in organized religion.

Welty includes a lot of information about her parents, stating throughout the book how much influence they had on her. Her father, Christian Welty, soundly believed in progress and science. Her mother, Chestina Andrews, is portrayed as a caring wife and mother who found the social life that was required of her to be frivolous. On one occasion, Welty tells the reader, Chestina apparently went into a burning building to save her complete works of Charles Dickens—a story that became the stuff of family legend.

The next part, “Learning to See,” touches on the travels Welty experienced during her late childhood. From Mississippi, she travels to Ohio, where her paternal grandparents live in a farmhouse, and then to West Virginia, to her maternal grandparents’ mountain home. The author talks about her car trips in the summertime when she got to see more of the world and broaden her sense of what was possible. Visiting each town and discovering its distinctiveness fueled her creativity in that she fantasized about what other people’s lives were like. Her travels helped her develop a sense of story as each trip was an experience that caused her to change in some way. It is not a coincidence, she says, that she begins Delta Wedding, her first novel, with a child who is riding a train. At this point in the book, Welty includes a collection of photos that were taken during her trips as well as pictures of her ancestors.



In the final section, “Finding a Voice,” the author notes that her childhood ended when she was riding a train to West Virginia and realized she was passing through other people’s lives as they passed through her own. When her father dies, she learns that he would often take that train ride when visiting her mother while her parents were engaged. After discovering her parents’ love letters, the author sees a different, more youthful side of her parents.

Welty explains how she feels the need to understand and relate to the world outside of herself, which prompts a journey of education, after which she realizes that she and the world do not work as she once thought they did. This education process includes her time in college at Mississippi State College for Women—and then the University of Wisconsin after she transfers—as well as her first job taking photographs at the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. Her time as a photographer, she says, also taught her a crucial element that helped her with her writing career. She learned the exact moment to snap the picture, which translates to her ability to choose the right moments to capture in her writing. Finally, she affirms that her education is a continuous process throughout her life. She always manages to make new discoveries about the characters in her books and about herself.