One Writer's Beginnings

Rating:
Summary: A writer's writer
Review: This is the most graceful, loving, exquisitely realized memoir imaginable. That said, I get tired of hearing adjectives like "graceful" and "lyrical" and "heartwarming" used in connection with Welty, because it makes her work sound ladylike or mushy when it is anything but. As a craftsman and a prose stylist she has few equals. The language in this book is so lean and precise that ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS could replace THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE as a composition textbook. No one builds a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter like Welty, and in this beautiful, reticent-but-revealing book she is at the top of her form.

Rating:
Summary: A writer's writer
Review: This is the most graceful, loving, exquisitely realized memoir imaginable. That said, I get tired of hearing adjectives like "graceful" and "lyrical" and "heartwarming" used in connection with Welty, because it makes her work sound ladylike or mushy when it is anything but. As a craftsman and a prose stylist she has few equals. The language in this book is so lean and precise that ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS could replace THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE as a composition textbook. No one builds a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter like Welty, and in this beautiful, reticent-but-revealing book she is at the top of her form.