title: Eudora Welty : Complete Novels: The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist's Daughter (Library of America)
author:  Eudora Welty 
description: This Library of America volume gathers all the long fiction published by the beloved Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Throughout her long and storied career, Welty has been most famous, perhaps, for her short stories. But it's in her novels that she attempted some of her most ambitious and powerful creations: the idiosyncratic fable that is <i>The Robber Bridegroom</i>, drawing on legends, local history, folktale, and myth; the underrated, wickedly funny short novel <i>The Ponder Heart</i>; and <i>Losing Battles</i>, a familial epic 15 years in the making and begun in bits and pieces while Welty cared for her sick mother. In a strange inversion of the author's usual career trajectory, Welty's only attempt at a <i> roman  clef</i> came late in life, with the <a href="www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/lists/awards/pulitzer.html/${0}">Pulitzer Prize</a>-winning <i>The Optimist's Daughter</i>, the quiet, moving, largely autobiographical story of a woman coming to grips with her father's death. The novels alone earn Welty a place as one of the finest writers our century has produced; taken together with the Library of America companion volume, <i>Stories, Essays, &amp; Memoir</i>, it's a body of work that William Maxwell calls "beyond human power of praising." Welty rarely strayed for long from the place of her birth, but her fiction is as capacious as the human heart itself. Like Faulkner, she has taken her own corner of Mississippi and made it encompass the world.
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  BOOKS BY EUDORA WELTY  
    
  
  
  _A Curtain of Green_
  
  
  _The Robber Bridegroom_
  
  
  _The Wide Net_
  
  
  _Delta Wedding_
  
  
  _The Golden Apples_
  
  
  _The Ponder Heart_
  
  
  _The Bride of the Innisfallen_
  
  
  _Losing Battles_
  
  
  _One Time, One Place_
  
  
  _The Eye of the Story_
  
  
  _One Writer’s Beginnings_
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/Welt_9780307787316_epub_tp_r1.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/Welt_9780307787316_epub_L01_r1.jpg)
  
  
  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 1990
  
  
  Copyright © 1969, 1972 by Eudora Welty
  
  
  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions
  Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House,
  Inc, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto
  Originally published by Random House, Inc, in May 1972
  
  
  _The Optimists Daughter_ appeared originally in _The New  
  Yorker_ in a shorter and different form
  
  
  _Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data_  
  Welty, Eudora, 1909  
  The optimists daughter  
  I Tit