The Eudora Welty House In Jackson, Mississippi

For a remarkable 76 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty lived here.

Built in 1925, Welty’s Tudor Revival house has been a National Historic Landmark since 2004

Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer, novelist, and photographer, who is most famous for writing about the American South.

Eudora was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Around the time of her high school graduation, Welty moved with her family to a house built for them at 1119 Pinehurst Street.

Architect Wyatt C. Hedrick designed and built the house in 1925 specifically for the Welty family.

This home remained Eudora’s permanent residence for the rest of her life. Here, she lived, entertained, gardened, and wrote her stories.

What’s most fascinating about this home is that The Mississippi Department of Archives and History has preserved and interpreted the home to the year 1986, when Welty was still actively writing and traveling.

Essentially, the home is a 1986 time capsule of a mature southern writer who had lived here the majority of her life.

The Eudora Welty House opened as a writer’s house museum to the public in 2006.

Her writing room has been frozen in time with many of her personal effects, documents, and furnishings.

There’s something so intriguing about a writer’s life… living each day in quiet solitude inside one’s head, not interacting with the outside world, but trying to make sense of it, or transcend it.

Eudora believed strongly that life lived among books is a peaceful, imaginative, and fulfilling life.

The Living Room:

The living room is strategically cluttered with many of Eudora’s beloved books.

Welty was an avid book collector, as well as an author.

Below is a 1956 photo of the Welty family:

Eudora’s father died of leukemia in 1931. Her mother died decades later in 1966, leaving the house to Eudora.

Eudora is quoted as saying “any room in our house, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read to.”

Books grace almost every surface of the home.

There is something so intrinsically beautiful about the clutter books.

Below is the breakfast nook where Eudora had her coffee each morning before writing.

The Kitchen:

Once again, we see a room frozen in or before 1986, when we can picture Eudora living and cooking there for decades with little change.

There is a frequently photographed small table below a window in one corner of the kitchen:

So quiet and lovely!

Eudora’s bedroom:

The room emanates a peacefulness, and, how gorgeous is that bedspread?

On the vanity, we see Eudora’s actual toiletries and knick-knacks:

Guests can take tours through the Welty home and are also welcome to roam the gardens outside.

The Gardens:

The garden landscape was originally designed by Chestina Welty, Eudora Welty’s mother, in 1925.

Welty and her mother built and tended the gardens over a period of decades.

The garden was often referred to by Eudora and her mother as “a labor of love”. It is located in the property in back of Eudora Welty’s home and is a popular tourist attraction.

Many of the flower species in this garden appeared in Eudora Welty’s stories and novels.

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.”
― Eudora Welty