Born at the Welty estate on North Congress Street, in Jackson, Mississippi, she was the daughter of an insurance executive father from Ohio and a mother from West Virginia who read avidly and passionately, who once raced back into a house smothered in flames to save a set of Dickens. She had two younger brothers, Edward and Walter.

Eudora attended Central High School in Jackson Mississippi, between 1921 and 1925. After completing high school, Welty went to the Mississippi College for Women, graduated from the University of Wisconsin (1929) and studied advertising at Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York for a year. During the time Eudora was in New York, she had a varied social life. Indeed, Eudora went dancing and attended the theater regularly.

During the Depression, Eudora returned to Jackson. In 1931, the same year that she returned, her father suddenly passed away. His death was a great loss to her and her family. Eudora soon began looking for jobs in advertising and publicity. The first job she obtained was a part-time job with radio station WJDX. Next, she got a full-time job with the Works Progress Administration as a Junior Publicity Agent. Welty's job duties were writing newspaper copies and taking photographs of places after destruction, studying troubled juveniles, putting booths in county fairs, and interviewing various people.

Her first short story appeared in 1936, and gradually she began to be published in small, then regional and general circulation magazines. She published collections of her short stories and began publishing novels, as well.

Soon after her first novel was published, she stopped writing to care full-time for her family for fifteen years: for two brothers with severe arthritis and her mother who had had a stroke. After her mother died in 1966, she returned to writing.

She was a 6-time winner of the O. Henry Award for Short Stories, and her many awards include the National Medal for Literature, the American Book Award, and, in 1969, a Pulitzer Prize.

She was also an accomplished and published photographer. But it is for her fiction, usually set in the rural South, that she's known as the First Lady of Southern Literature.

Eudora died at the age of 92, at Baptist Medical Center in Jackson, of cardio-pulmonary failure linked to pneumonia.