Eudora Welty's Birthday: April 13, 1909

Eudora Welty wrote short stories and novels set in the deep South, drawing on her upbringing in Jackson, Mississippi.

She won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for a novel, "The Optimist's Daughter," in 1972. That same year, the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded her the gold medal for fiction.

I know her through her autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings. She wrote wonderful character descriptions in this volume, along with phrases that I love:

"The strands are all there; to the memory, nothing is ever really lost."

"She (Welty's mother) read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him."

"...all serious daring starts from within."