Consider this a column on the politics of biography. Some biographers make themselves; others are adopted. Suzanne Marrs belongs to the latter category, which means her work has been given the imprimatur of the Welty establishment, a confederacy of academics and literary figures gathered ’round the shrine of St. Eudora.

I give her that honorific because no American writer in living memory has been so adored. As Ms. Marrs acknowledges, Welty projected an image of gentle integrity and humane good humor that made her seem a paragon. She received nearly 40 honorary degrees (maybe more; Ms. Marrs is not sure), which get their own appendix in this biography. No anthology of American literature can do without a Welty story such as that comic classic, “Why I Live at the P.O.” Only William Faulkner ranks more highly in the pantheon of Southern literature.

Welty put the finishing touches to her consecration in her charming and best-selling “One Writer’s Beginnings” (1984). Ms. Marrs notes that Welty hoped to head off biographers with this memoir, as John Updike has so far successfully done with “Self-Consciousness.” Certainly Welty made it hard for any biographer to probe deeper without seeming a spoilsport.

But in “Writing a Woman’s Life” (1988), critic and biographer Carolyn Heilbrun questioned Welty’s autobiography, wondering where was the woman who had made a literary career? Where were the ambition, the irony, and bitterness that mark – at least to some extent – all writers’ lives? The sanctification had reached such a pitch in the early 1990s that a blaspheming biographer was bound to desecrate the temple.

I now have to declare an interest: I encouraged Ann Waldron to write the first biography of Welty, published as “Eudora: A Writer’s Life” (1998). Ms. Waldron, a native Southerner and author of acclaimed biographies of Caroline Gordon and Hodding Carter (this is no blurb; check the record: she did a creditable research job even though she did not have full access to her subject’s papers and the Welty establishment shunned her).

Ms. Marrs dismisses Ms. Waldron in a sentence, suggesting the biographer’s attempt to “humanize the mythic ‘Miss Eudora'” resulted in creating “an equally reductive image: the charming and successful ugly duckling.” But what are Ms. Marrs’s own bona fides?

Biographer no. 2, a Welty scholar, explains that she became her subject’s friend during last 15 years of Welty’s life. Even though she knew Welty opposed not only Ms. Waldron but any other writer attempting a Welty biography, why did Ms. Marrs ask Welty’s permission to write her biography, and why did Welty “promptly” grant the request?

Silence from Ms. Marrs. Might Ms. Waldron’s biography, which appeared in the year Ms. Marrs got her go-ahead, have had something to do with Welty’s volte-face? What Ms. Marrs dare not acknowledge (what would the Welty establishment say?) is that her book would have been inconceivable without Ms. Waldron’s valiant first effort.

And what did Ms. Marrs discover when she was awarded complete access to the Welty sanctuary? Welty had conserved a huge amount of material – strange doings for a biographobe. Surely this hoard should have been burned: Henry James made quite a pyre out of his papers. Instead, the only sacred texts Ms. Marrs was not permitted to handle were certain family letters held back until 20 years after Welty’s death.

Do all these behind-the-scenes revelations about the biography world matter? I think they do, because they affect the biographer, her sources, and the milieu in which her book will be enshrined. This book comes ready-made with a blurb from Welty high priest, the novelist Reynolds Price.

This is not a bad book, though Ms. Marrs suffers from the bloat that often afflicts authorized biographers. She has relics, and she wants to show all of them. She also feels the need to comment when no comment is necessary. Thus she reports that baby Eudora played with dolls and made up stories about them. “The future story writer was at an early age engaging her imagination.” Ah, I see.

Then there are moments when Ms. Marrs might comment but thinks she is only conveying amusing information. She notes, for example, that 12-year-old Eudora created for her brother Edward’s entertainment her own book, complete with blurbs:

HEAR WHAT THE CRITICS SAY ABOUT IT!

ANDREW VOLSTEAD – “Never heard of it.”
WAYNE B. WHELER – “I haven’t read it.”
JOHN ROACH STRATTON – “I know nothing about it.”

Ms. Marrs then describes Eudora in the eighth grade. But hold on! Here Welty is expressing a satirical nature reminiscent of the juvenile Jane Austen – one of Welty’s favorite writers. What struck me is that like other ambitious writers – Susan Sontag comes to mind – Welty always wanted to be a writer. And she didn’t just want to write; she wanted to take her place in that world of publishing and of writers and critics.

Spending so much of her life in Jackson, Miss., Welty made it look like the world came to her. In fact she was out there hustling like any other writer, enjoying her trips to New York City, pursuing novelist Elizabeth Bowen in London, and in general keeping her eye on the main chance.

Ms. Waldron shows us such truths in a pointed fashion. Ms. Marrs, on the other hand, provides more facts and a much more intimate view of Welty’s love life. For Weltyians this biography is indispensable. But they must take its provenance, or they will not be getting the whole story.