The Optimist's Daughter: A Novel

Eudora Welty’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel tells the story of a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to confront her past and the family she left behind.

In celebration of Random House’s 100th anniversary, the publisher is reissuing this landmark publication as a hardcover edition featuring bold new cover art, a stunning paper-over-board design, and custom endpapers.

Laurel Hand, a widow of World War II and the daughter of a prominent Southern judge, travels South from her home in Chicago to sit by her father’s side as he undergoes surgery. With them is Fay, her father’s new, much younger wife and a foil to the stalwart, levelheaded Laurel. The two women clash and their futures are forever changed by the judge’s sudden death.

Laurel returns to her former Mississippi home to take charge of the funeral, where she is thrown back into the small town she left behind, and must confront her and Fay’s roles in their new family. Alone in the house she grew up in, Laurel confronts elements of the past and comes to a better understanding of it, of herself, and of her parents.

With unsurpassed artistry, Welty’s story is one in which “two kinds of people, two versions of life, two contending forces in America collide. . . . Its small dramatic battle sends reverberations in every direction” (The New York Times).