Lit Finals
Tennessee Williams
• Themes in his/her work: 1. reality and illusion 2. the search for happiness 3. conflict between individual desires and family responsibility 4. the growth of an artist
Eudora Welty
• Won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter
Tennessee Williams
• Won a prize in a national writing contest at sixteen
Eudora Welty
• Themes are importance of family and community relations and, paradoxically, the strange solitariness of human experience. • Uses myth and symbol in his/her work
Alice Walker
• Themes in her writing include oppression, the struggle of black women toward self-realization in a hostile environment, and the preservation of black heritage
Flannery O'Connor
• After battling lupus, an autoimmune disease, for more than a decade, he/she died on August 3, 1964, in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Alice Walker
• Blinded in one eye when he/she was eight years old; left him/her physically and emotionally scarred; injury forced him/her to withdraw from social contacts into a world of sometimes not so pleasant daydreams • The injury also made him/her eligible for college scholarships. He/She attended Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College.
Tennessee Williams
• Born in Columbus, Mississippi; lived with his/her grandfather, an Episcopal minister until his family moved to St. Louis in 1918
Alice Walker
• Born in Georgia to a sharecropper family
Eudora Welty
• Born in Jackson, Mississippi and lived there most of his/her life
Flannery O'Connor
• Early on, he/she demonstrated his/her literary talents for school publications. Studying at what is now the University of Iowa for a master's degree, his/her first story, "The Geranium," was published in 1946. He/She had also begun what was to be first novel, Wise Blood, published in 1952.
Flannery O'Connor
• For his/her work, he/she received many honors, including an O. Henry Award in 1957 and the National Book Award in 1972
Eudora Welty
• Grew up in a loving home where reading was emphasized • Studied English and advertising in college
William Faulkner
• HIs/Her fiction begins and ends in Oxford, a place that exposed him/her to former slaves, Old Confederates, alleged ghosts and every other imaginable character that a small town can produce.
Eudora Welty
• Has an unerring keenness of observation, both in physical landscape and in characterization; able to create convincing psychological portraits of an immensely varied cast of characters • He/She has several books of photographs published and had a show of his/her photographs in New York in 1936.
Alice Walker
• Has taught writing at several colleges including Jackson State University in Mississippi
Tennessee Williams
• He/She said of his characters that ". . . human relations are terrifyingly ambiguous. If you write a character that isn't ambiguous you are writing a false character, not a true one."
William Faulkner
• He/She used stream-of-consciousness narrative, a psychological approach of projecting events through the memory or consciousness of the character in the form of "interior monologue."
William Faulkner
• He/She was a creative genius in his/her ability to construct a world of imagination in which reality is more accessible than it is in the everyday actualities of life. He/She felt a need to tell and retell the events of the past, from several points of view, and with versions by several different characters, as in The Sound and the Fury.
William Faulkner
• He/She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for literature in 1949 and also a National Book Award. In his/her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, he/she told young writers that the only subject "worth the agony and sweat" of the artist is "the human heart in conflict with itself."
Flannery O'Connor
• He/She was best-known, however, for his/her short stories, which appeared in several collections, including A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).
William Faulkner
• He/She was born in New Albany, MS, and when he/she was four, around 1901, the family moved from New Albany to Oxford, the model for "Jefferson" in his/her fiction. • Oxford's home county, Lafayette, inspired fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
William Faulkner
• His style is complex, but it is consistent with his objective: to keep continuously in focus the character, "the human heart in conflict," while evoking that past which is always present with us.
William Faulkner
• His/Her grandfather (the Old Colonel) published a best-selling novel The White Rose of Memphis; he was shot and killed in Ripley, MS by a political opponent in 1889.
William Faulkner
• His/Her stories come from family paper and county records from the first settlement of Native Americans (from his/her hometown of Oxford, MS).
Tennessee Williams
• His/Her strengths are his/her poetic dialogue and his/her innovative use of the technical possibilities of the twentieth-century stage (sets dissolving, walls fading away, lighting only parts of the stage, etc.)
Flannery O'Connor
• His/Her work was informed by his/her experiences growing up as a Catholic in the South. Religion was a recurring theme in his/her work, and the main characters of his/her first and second novels were preachers of sorts.
Alice Walker
• Married Melvyn Levanthal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she met through her active involvement in the civil rights movement
Eudora Welty
• Mostly a regional writer; sets most of his/her works in the Mississippi Delta
Alice Walker
• She uses the images of quilting and gardening as metaphors for the creative struggle of black women. She uses the traditions, the culture, and the family to illustrate the necessity for putting an end to violence and injustice. She also illustrates the relationship between individual dignity and community dignity and insists that women applaud their godliness.
Tennessee Williams
• The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway in 1945 and for the next two decades he/she dominated the American theater alongside Arthur Miller. • Many of his/her plays were turned into movies.
Tennessee Williams
• Ill as a child, shy and sensitive, Williams suffered the taunts of neighborhood bullies. • Given to reading and writing poetry, he was a disappointment to his macho father.
Eudora Welty
• Worked as a writer for radio and for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during and after the Depression • His/Her work with the WPA allowed her to travel through Mississippi taking photos, interviewing people, and writing articles.
Alice Walker
• Writes poetry, short stories, novels, and essays; acknowledges Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings as influences on his/her writing
Flannery O'Connor
• was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. His/Her father died of systemic lupus erythematosus when he/she was a teenager.
