The Optimist's Daughter
Franklin Library, 1978. Collector's Edition--Pulitzer Prize. Full Leather. Fine / No Jacket as Issued. Item #5265
All profits from this sale will be donated to the Oregon Ballet Theater. When/if possible, collectors will be provided with a donation number they can keep as part of the book's history.
A beautiful brown leather edition of Eudora Welty's Pulitzer Prize-winning work. Originally published in 1972. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 1973 and considered Welty's masterpiece. Flawless green moire silk endpapers, gold-gilt cover designs and page edges, and bound-in silk bookmark. In Fine collectible condition with no flaws. This item is available for media mail shipping unless otherwise arranged.
The highly talented Southern writer Welty was unafraid to critically analyze the past and penned this story about the middle-aged widow Laurel struggling to make sense of inter-generational family dynamics.
In her 1982 essay (published by The Southern Literary Journal) “Images of Memory in Eudora Welty’s “The Optimist’s Daughter,” author Marilyn Arnold explained how Welty explored, in depth, social and scripted roles, and the release of the past by re-viewing it again through a critical, wiser eye: “Welty’s several themes are death, human relationship, and the effects of memory on the past, but through the use of image, symbol, ritual and parable she weaves them together into one thematic whole. Death, Welty says, plunges the dead into the past by snapping the present shut, and what becomes important then is what living memory does with the past. Laurel must now ponder the nature of her parent’s love; she must reconsider the brief perfection of love she and Philip Hand shared; and she must reconsider that it is not the dead but the living who, in their loneliness and uncertainty, are in danger."
Price: $95.00 other currencies