The Golden Apples (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Welty, Eudora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014119684X ISBN 13: 9780141196848

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2011

Synopsis

First published in 1949, THE GOLDEN APPLES is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There's Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There's Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson.

Eudora Welty has a fine ear for dialogue and describes each of the characters in incisive, haunting prose. '...in the South,' she says, 'everybody stays busy talking all the time - they're not sorry for you to overhear their tales'. Welty deftly picks up their stories to create an unflinching potrait of everyday life in the American South and offers a deeply moving look at human nature.

About this title

Review:

A great and generous achievement (Jonathan Raban)

I doubt that a better book about 'the South' - one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life and its special tone and pattern - has ever been written (New Yorker)

A hauntingly beautiful work...This excellent new edition is prefaced with an essay by Paul Binding which sheds light on the mythic structures that underpin the tales (The Independent, Paperbacks of the Year)

From the Back Cover:

Here is Eudora Welty's classic portrait of a Mississippi town-where, as one inhabitant says, "time goes like a dream no matter how hard you run." In Morgana, the young think of other places and the old know every name on every stone in the cemetery at the town's edge. Young and old, black and white, married and spinster, restless or settled, the voices that make up this collection of interrelated stories prove that Welty, as Katherine Anne Porter once wrote, had "an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork." Like James Joyce's Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, The Golden Apples, though it gives readers a particular time and place, is both timeless and universal.
"I doubt that a better book about 'the South'--one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life, and its special tone and pattern--has ever been written."-Original review, September 3, 1949, The New Yorker
"A work of art . . . the original creation of an invaluable artist."-The New York Times Book Review

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She worked as a photographer during the Depression and published her first book, a collection of short stories, in 1941. In addition to short fiction, Welty wrote novels, novellas, essays, and reviews, and was the winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. By the time of her death in 2001, Welty had established herself as one of the most important and beloved American writers of the twentieth century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 014119684X
• ISBN 13: 9780141196848
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304