We who live in the American South rightly claim Eudora Welty as one of ours, as we do William Faulkner, both of whom are known all over America and the world. Readers can find their work featured not only at Square Books, itself legendary, in Oxford, Miss. (Faulkner was born in Oxford, Welty in Jackson), but also translated for readers as far away as Prague or Tokyo. It is delightful to wonder what Welty's international readers make of her brilliantly comic story of the postmistress who gets so mad with her family that she moves into the "next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi" - but literature probably translates better than foreign policy. And an old grandmother's walk along a worn path (in a story by that name) may give us our most sensitive understanding of a Southern black by a Southern white (it was written in 1940).

Long before Welty died (in 2001, at age 92), she was legendary. In 1998 she had become the first living American writer whose works were published in the Library of America series. Now there is a full-length biography that will go a long way in helping us to know Welty, the woman and the writer. Suzanne Marrs, a close friend of Welty's in the last two decades of her life, and a teacher/scholar at Millsaps College in Jackson, has the personal and the professional knowledge that makes her biography so exemplary. It will be the benchmark for all other biographers.

The work of a biographer is akin to a detective's, requiring the patience and the skills to construct a trail of reliable evidence. Biography is a big puzzle, and finding the pieces that fit requires more than a summer's vacation on the porch. It requires years, decades. Marrs herself began her study of Welty's fiction in the l970s, resulting in a book called One Writer's Imagination, which gives a clear and comprehensive analysis of Welty's work of a lifetime. Welty contributed more to Marrs' biography than the time she spent being interviewed (and entertained, and in her last years, looked after by Marrs and by her family and other friends): She herself wrote about her childhood for a series of lectures at Harvard.

Some critics are derisive in their regard for biographers; in a wicked phrase by Elizabeth Hardwick, biographers are described as "the quick in pursuit of the dead." Hardwick thinks that a biography is driven more by "a lot of busy work" than by imagination. British biographer Michael Holroyd attacks biography from the inside: biographers, Holroyd admits, can "rob us of enchantment - they are continually trying to explain how the rabbit got into the hat." As Holroyd demonstrates in his own biographies, however, there's enchantment simply in finding the rabbit in the hat in the first place.

Marrs has done a great deal of busy, careful, and admirable research, not only of benefit to readers of her book but also of benefit to other scholars and critics, whose articles and books are still to come. (Marrs cataloged the collection of papers Welty gave to the Mississippi Archives before her death. Soon afterward, Marrs asked Welty for permission to write her biography, and Welty agreed.) After years of reading the work and talking with Eudora Welty, Marrs knew her subject well, and in writing about her she has stuck closely to Welty's own words and, sometimes, to Welty's own interpretations. In this regard, Marrs has been criticized by some reviewers for having been far too close to her subject. But there were advantages to her being there.

With Welty's permission to read personal letters, Marrs lifted the veil on one of Welty's most important relationships: her friendship with Kenneth Millar (writing detective stories under the name Ross MacDonald).

Suggesting that "Eudora" and "Ken" loved one another, Marrs has been faulted by Jonathan Yardley and other reviewers for reading more into the friendship than they think it calls for. Marrs also gives attention to a relationship between Eudora Welty and John Robinson, a longtime Jackson friend, who ultimately defined himself as homosexual. Interest in the sex lives of writers is nothing new (even Leon Edel, after publishing his multi-volume biography of Henry James, felt he had to go back later and talk about James's sexuality).

If relationships (with men, with women, with family) are one avenue of Marrs' thorough pursuit of her subject, she also takes other roads. Much of the book (perhaps too much) is a full calendar of Welty's travels in America and abroad, proving that she was constantly on the move. Welty's liberal political instincts and her attitudes about race relationships in the South are also carefully explored.

Marrs, I am now concluding, made several judgment calls that guided her over her decades of work. She decided, or I think she must have decided, that she had to deal with - even if accused of being defensive - stereotypes that so plague unmarried, Southern white women of Welty's generation: Was she a recluse who seldom left home? A Southern white who reflected narrow race and class attitudes? A lesbian or a loveless spinster?

Marrs patiently and sensibly sets out to dismantle each of these cliches, even when I bet she would have liked to send them all packing. (Marrs spends less time looking at the mother-daughter relationship. An earlier biographer, Anne Waldron, suggests that in Chestina Welty's last years she was cruel in her demands on Eudora, and Eudora Welty herself, as Marrs does acknowledge, admitted in print that she felt "guilty" every time she left home.) Marrs interprets Welty as a very complex human being, pointing out that Welty, defending her privacy with interviewers, always said that anything anyone wanted to know about her they could find in her stories. In dwelling too much on the "personality" of Eudora Welty, readers should not miss the many excellent critical insights that Suzanne Marrs brings to her commanding reading of the work itself.

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