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benevolent comprehension of such as who was the mother ot torever trumped every otner start,everything in it his son, William. dimension of his life. Knight Ridder NewsWelty approaches the art of writingON WRITINGBy Eudora Welty Nonfiction Modern Library. $14 95In “On Writing,” the great American writer Eudora Welty, who died last year, examines literature with the same gimlet eye that, in creating her fictional world, she so often turned on life.For anyone who loves literature and wants to understand it better, these seven essays, published between 1949 and 1973,are jewels wise and witty, with every observation informed by years of reading and writing.Some are grand, sweeping, overarching: “Making reality real is art's responsibility.” In other instances, Ms. Welty makes her case with more focused observations.“Looking at Short Stories,” for example, starts from the most basic idea of a story, the narrative thread a simple sequence of events — and add ing to it the question “Why?” tocreate a plot The question is simple, but can be answered in almost any way, and Ms. Welty devotes the rest of the essay to showing how writers have answered it, drawing examples from stories by Stephen Crane, Katherine Mansfield. Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence and William Faulkner.Some of the essays seem to be based on Ms. Welty’s views of her own work: “It seems likely that all of one writer’s stories do tend to spring from the same source within him. However they differ in theme or approach, however they vary in mood or fluctuate in their strength, their power to reach the mind or heart, all of one writer’s stories carry their signature because of one impulse most characteristic of his own gift — to praise, to love, to call up into view.”Only in one essay — “Must the Novelist Crusade?” - does she approach a specific issue.Few of Ms. Welty’s ideas in “On Writing are original, but that makes them no less valid.Knight Ridder News
Newspaper Details
Annapolis Sunday Capital
Annapolis, Maryland, US
Sun, Oct 06, 2002
Page 48
Full Page
Clipped by
Melissa F.
USA 25 Feb 2025
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