That's a pretty heavy loss for the planet. Also, Mordecai Richler died recently, best know for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, I only became hip to him a couple of years ago when reading what I guess was his last novel--Barney's Version, great book.
- jimlouis 7-24-2001 9:39 pm [add a comment]

• 
  Have not noticed any mention of the "Eudora" software, her namesake. This in todays nyt :
  
  
  
  
  July 25, 2001 - NYT
  
  
  
  Eudora Welty's Daringly Sheltered Life
  
  
  
  A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out," Eudora
  Welty once wrote. Miss Welty, who die Monday at 92, knew the feel of that fire
  better than almost anyone. As a writer, she warmed herself on place. It is
  "the stuff of fiction," she wrote, "as close to our living lives as the earth we
  can pick up and rub between our fingers, something we can feel and smell."
  Who knows whether she would have thought just this way if she hadn't lived
  her whole long life at home in Jackson, Miss.? But she did, and so anyone
  who reads her now finds Jackson added to the atlas of places that we know
  better, through literature, than we know our own towns.
  
  
  
  Writing about that distant Jackson, Miss Welty often had the chance to
  portray herself as a young girl, an "indelible" child, as she put it, who slowly
  discovered that the people in town were making themselves indelible to her.
  She was a young girl who seemed, in her zeal, to spurn the very idea of
  disappointment. She read books, as she put it, "Snap!" She watched the life
  of the town open-eyed, and she has managed to preserve, in her written
  memory of her family life in Jackson, the limits of what she was allowed to
  know, though the intonations of her prose suggest how much more she
  eventually found out. A reader might almost imagine that Jackson formed like
  a pearl around her and that she was its luster
  
  .
  
  Miss Welty is beloved for her stories, her novels and her photographs. But
  she is particularly beloved for three lectures she gave at Harvard when she
  was 74 years old, which were gathered in "One Writer's Beginnings."
  Americans are not used to being talked to as plainly as she talked about the
  writing life. She helped readers see how closely connected it is to all the
  kinds of lives other people live and how much of its vitality emerges from
  memory. Miss Welty made no secret of her writing, no professional mystery.
  Her affection for it was evident, but there was no trace of self-consciousness
  in the way she talked about it, nothing to set her apart from the people to
  whom she had listened, as neighbors, her whole existence. "A sheltered life
  can be a daring life as well," she concluded, "for all serious daring starts from
  within."
  
  
  - bill 7-25-2001 6:42 pm [add a comment]




• On the softare program that bears her name:
  

  After working on the new email program for a year, Dorner was ready to release it for free to the Internet community at large. The working name was UIUCMail, which Dorner realized was a tongue twister. Then he remembered a short story written by Eudora Welty (1909-2001) titled "Why I Live at the P.O." It's a story about a woman who decides to live at the post office where she works rather than put up with her family at home any longer. Dorner was processing so much email at the time that he felt like he lived at the post office, and his program used a "post office" protocol to fetch mail, so he saw a metaphorical connection. Since the programming and naming took place a decade ahead of the phenomenal growth of the Internet, Dorner hadn't anticipated Eudora would eventually be used by more than 20 million people. Naming the program after a living author could have become awkward for Dorner and any future licensees. Fortunately, Ms. Welty was flattered and amused by the allusion to her and her work."

  You can read the Welty story here.
  - jim 7-26-2001 12:15 am [add a comment]