EUDORA: A WRITER'S LIFE

EUDORA: A WRITER'S LIFE Ann Waldron (Doubleday, $25.95) The all-too-fitting epigraph to this first biography of Eudora Welty quotes the subject herself: '''Your private life should be kept private.... They'd have a hard time trying to find something about me.''' Indeed they have. While the revered 90-year-old writer and beloved Jackson, Mississippi, resident is famously uncooperative with biographers, Southern journalist Waldron didn't foresee that Welty's coterie would unanimously maintain their friend's code of silence. So this earnest writer was left to cull from previously published material, with only wispy speculations on Welty's seemingly placid relationships, such as her rumored affair with Elizabeth Bowen. Sadly, with Welty and her friends likely taking such stories to their graves, we may never get a complete account of this writer's real life. C+