Eudora Welty in the context of Eudora Welty House

Welty is a surname of Swiss-German origin. Notable people with the surname include:

• Benjamin F. Welty (1870–1962), American politician from Ohio; U.S. representative 1917–21
• Chris Welty (contemporary), American computer scientist
• Eudora Welty (1909–2001), American author and photographer
• Harry Welty (contemporary), American school board chairman in Duluth, Minnesota
• John Welty (contemporary), American college administrator; president of California State University at Fresno 1991–2013
• Rachel Perry Welty (born 1962), American photographer
• Ron Welty (born 1971), American punk-rock drummer

Philip Milton Roth (/rɒθ/; March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.

Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. James Wood wrote: "More than any other post-war American writer, Roth wrote the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced but above all constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language... He would not cease from exploration; he could not cease, and the varieties of fiction existed for him to explore the varieties of experience".

Lew Archer is a fictional character created by American-Canadian writer Ross Macdonald, a private detective working in Southern California. Between the late 1940s and the early '70s, the character appeared in 18 novels and a handful of shorter works as well as several film and television adaptations. Macdonald's Archer novels have been praised for introducing more literary themes and psychological depth to the hardboiled fiction genre. Critic John Leonard declared that Macdonald had surpassed the limits of crime fiction to become "a major American novelist", while author Eudora Welty was a fan of the series and carried on a lengthy correspondence with Macdonald. The editors of Thrilling Detective wrote: "The greatest P.I. series ever written? Probably."