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Eudora Alice Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi, and became an esteemed American short story writer and novelist whose work centered on the American South. Her mother was a schoolteacher who encouraged Welty’s love of reading, and her father was an insurance salesman, who encouraged an interest in mechanical gadgets that would influence her later work. In the autobiographical One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty says she honed her skills of observation by watching her family members interact with one another, which would later influence the dialogue and characterizations in her writing. Welty was highly educated, studying at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and the Columbia University School of Business. Venturing out of university during the Great Depression, Welty struggled to find attractive job prospects. After working at a radio station and a newspaper, she took a position with the Works Progress Administration in publicity. Her job required that she travel through rural Mississippi taking photos, where she encountered many of the people who would shape the characters in short stories like “A Worn Path.”
 
After three years, Welty left her job to focus on writing full time. In 1936, she published her first short story, “The Death of a Traveling Salesman,” in a literary magazine. She rose to success quickly, publishing her first short story collection, A Curtain of Green, in 1941, which included many stories that would ultimately become classics, including “A Worn Path,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” and “Petrified Man.” She went on to publish over forty short stories, five novels, and three works of nonfiction. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973 for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

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