Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909, near the state capital in Jackson, Mississippi. She was daughter to an insurance executive father from Ohio and a mother from West Virginia who possessed a passion for reading. Welty led a sheltered life, spending the majority of her childhood in Jackson, but later moved on to further her education. She attended Mississippi State College for Women, then moved on to the University of Wisconsin, and finished her education at Columbia University in New York. After college, she traveled widely and held several lecturing and teaching positions.

She was a renowned novelist and short story writer who was always viewed as mild and modest. Her short stories were said to be her richest works simply because they tell much about Welty herself. Many of her works focused upon intricacies of human relationships. Some of her most famous works include A Curtain of Green (1941), The Golden Apples (1949), and Delta Wedding (1946). She has also published some books of her photographs taken while she worked for the government during the Depression. Welty sums up her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), with three sentences, "As you have seen, I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts within." Eudora Welty died on July 23, 2001, at a Jackson hospital while suffering from pneumonia.