Further to this, her work is shot through with references to Yeats, Homer, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson and Ovid. More considered analysis uncovers stylistic and thematic affiliations with Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Jane Austen, Isak Dinesen, James Joyce and Chekhov: a blend that, combined with her own sensibility, proved a potent mixture. She was frequently compared to Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner which, superficial similarities aside, seems more a geographical than a literary judgment. The book sold just 7,000 copies in the 30 years that elapsed before Welty's first major commercial success, the family saga Losing Battles (1970), but it contains several stories that have been heavily anthologised over the years: the deceptively simple "A Worn Path", the feverishly comedic monologue "Why I Live at the P.O.", the grotesque "Clytie", and the satiric, impishly sexual "Petrified Man".ĭespite the range and accomplishment of Welty's stories she was often dismissed as a regionalist, an unjust accusation that only receded late in her career. Journals began accepting Welty's stories in the early 1930s and her first collection, A Curtain of Green, was published in 1941. It's a portrait that tells nothing of the cryptic brilliance of her best fiction.īut reputations like these can blockade a writer's work rather than promote it, which I think might be the case with Welty.
Long before her death in 2001, aged 92, she had become the grande dame of American letters: an infallibly polite and humorous southern lady who still lived in the same house, in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was born. Eudora Welty won eight O Henry awards and the Pulitzer prize, was awarded the Légion d'honneur, became the first living author to have her works published in a Library of America edition, and was long considered a likely recipient of the Nobel.
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