Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1909. After attending colleges in Mississippi, Wisconsin, and New York, she worked as a radio journalist and a publicity agent. Despite graduating from college in the midst of the Great Depression, she was able to find work for three years before deciding to make writing her full-time career. Welty published many short stories, books, and articles over the course of her career, even winning a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, before dying in 2001. Being an author, books were very important to her as a child and all throughout her life. In her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty reveals the intensity and value of her childhood memories of reading and books through her descriptions of Mrs.Calloway, herself, and her mother.
Welty’s description of her hometown librarian, Mrs.Calloway suggests the…show more content… Eudora is very serious about her reading. Upon facing obstacles in the library that would potentially keep her from reading, she was “willing” to “do anything to read.” The sudden use of short sentences emphasizes her earnest dedication to reading. Welty uses the language of addiction to convey her relationship to books. Eudora does not simply want to read books, she goes through books “as fast as [she can] go” to fill her “devouring wish” for them. Her relationship to books is based off of necessity which her diction conveys quite clearly. For Welty, reading is not a simple pastime, it is as necessary as breathing or sleeping. Eudora’s one fear is “of books coming to an end.” Later in her life, Welty becomes an author, essentially assuring that books will never end and her worst fear can never come true. Welty’s love of reading, however, did not appear overnight; her mother had a great influence on her bookish