The Optimist’s Daughter at fifty
By her own account, Eudora Welty had an idyllic childhood. Born in 1909 on Congress Street, two blocks from the state capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty spent her early years playing with friends from school, reading voraciously and riding her bicycle to the local store to pick up some flour or eggs for her mother and, of course, a treat for herself. Her father, who was devoted to his wife and children, advanced from a cashier to vice president at Lamar Life Insurance before his daughter had finished high school. He had, as Welty put it, a love for “all instruments that would instruct and fascinate,” including a toy train set, a telescope and a folding Kodak, with which he would teach the young Eudora the pleasures of photography.
