A Study Guide for Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535828826

Book preview

08

Moon Lake

Eudora Welty

1949

Introduction

Eudora Welty wrote the short story Moon Lake in 1947. It was rejected by seven magazines before being published by the Sewanee Review in 1949. The story was then very slightly revised and published in Welty's collection of short stories The Golden Apples, also published in 1949. It was later republished in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in 1980. This is the standard collection of Welty's stories and it is still in print.

The origin of the story lies in Welty's experience of going to summer camp as a young girl in Rankin County, Mississippi; in the camp, as in the story, some of the girls were orphans. Moon Lake, which takes place near the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi, focuses on the relationships between three girls, Nina Carmichael, Jinny Love Stark, and an orphan named Easter. The story explores the theme of identity and belonging, and also of initiation, since not only the girls but also the boy who serves as a lifeguard at the camp go through difficult, challenging experiences. When, on the last day of camp, Easter nearly drowns in the lake, Nina is forced to make a leap from the innocent world of childhood into the more complex reality of adolescence. With its superb descriptive passages that evoke the atmosphere of the summer camp, its mythic dimensions, and its insight into the lives of young girls, Moon Lake is an enduring example of Welty's work at its best.

Author Biography

Eudora Alice Welty was born April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Christian Welty, an insurance executive from Ohio, and Chestina, a homemaker from West Virginia. She had by her own account a happy childhood, and as a young girl she was an avid reader; Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mark Twain were among her favorite writers. She also showed a precocious talent for writing; publishing several stories on children's magazines before she was a teenager. At Central High School in Jackson, she published poems and sketches in the school newspaper. In 1925, when she entered Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, she already had ambitions to be a writer.

For her final two years of college, she transferred to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from which she graduated in 1929 with a bachelor of arts degree. She then spent an academic year in New York City at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business.

In 1931, Welty worked in Jackson, doing