Grief and love, 04 Feb 2008
Like love, grief is ultimately something that we must all go through alone. There can be people who help, but our emotional journeys are ours alone.

And that is the heart of "The Optimist's Daughter," a dark, quiet little novel set in the mid-20th century South. Eudora Welty explores a difficult, emotionally wringing topic -- one woman losing the last loved one she had, and the struggle to come to terms with the many people she's lost.

Elderly but healthy Judge McKelva goes in for an eye operation, but seems strangely lethargic afterwards. His daughter Laurel -- who has been away for several years -- is concerned as her father continues to decline, especially since his flaky second wife Fay is treating him badly, and even has to be physically restrained by a nurse. Then the judge dies.

And Laurel finds herself in her old family home, trying to deal with Fay, her weird family, and the many well-meaning-but-dense friends that McKelva had over the years. But when the house is empty and she is alone, Laurel looks back on her life -- her all-too-brief marriage to a loving man, her mother's horrible death, and her father's remarriage -- and learns how to feel again.

Few books that I've read really handle the subject of grief -- usually people hug, cry, and get over it except for a few pages every now and then, when there is a mention of the Dearly Departed.

But not many authors can really get to the wrenching, lonely core of grief and loss, and how it can set us free, or lock our emotions and throw away the key. And that is basically what "The Optimist's Daughter" is all about -- McKelva's illness and death are a prelude to Laurel's soul-searching, and the exploration of how she handles her grief.

Welty wraps the slow, gradual storyline (which takes only a few days) in warm, colourful prose ("Sienna-bright leaves and thorns like spurts of matchflame had pierced through..."). She does have a tendency to let the dialogue from various people ramble, but often that rambling makes some very sharp points about loss, such as how the well-meaning often tell white lies about the dead, or ignore their dying wishes.

Laurel is kind of a nonentity for the first half of the book -- she's all locked up in herself, and we don't know much about her. But then Welty paints the devastating pain and guilt that she's been feeling, and shows how you have to let go of the past in order to live the future. Quite a contrast to the childish, putrescent Fay, whose rallying cry is always "What about ME?" and who accuses her dying husband of ruining her birthday.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is only optimistic as it ends -- up until then, it's a beautifully painful look at love, loss, and grief. A magnificent story, if a rather uncomfortable one.

Especially meaningful to people of a "certain age.", 20 Oct 2002
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, this moving study of memory and the progression of generations is still vibrant and relevant thirty years later. Not only does it show us the ripple effect that one person's passing has on loved ones, it also shows us the changes to society which occur as older generations pass away and new generations take their place.

Welty's concern here is with values--those traditional southern (U.S.) values learned by Laurel, the daughter of a Mississippi judge, from her parents; those learned by her parents from their parents; those imparted by the town she grew up in and the people who lived there; and those which Laurel has absorbed from her life as an artist in Chicago. In her values she is in direct contrast with Fay, the judge's young second wife, a crass and selfish woman from Texas with a large, boisterous, and uneducated family--a woman whose only desire is to come out a winner. When the judge dies, Laurel returns temporarily to her old room in the family home, which, Fay takes great pains to remind her, now belongs to Fay. There, surrounded by family belongings, she is assailed by memories of her childhood, her mother, her mother's final illness, and her relationship with her father. Her pre-occupation with the past is in direct contrast with Fay's concern with the present and her future--these women clearly belong to different worlds, and only Laurel is capable of change or adaptation.

Welty's ear for dialogue is unerring. She reveals character, class, and education in her syntax and choice of vocabulary and creates conflicts from the smallest of details--a misunderstood word, an imagined slight, a presumption. The conflict is leavened by humor in many places, some of it dark, especially when Fay's "no 'count" family arrives at the funeral. The characters themselves lack subtlety, however, and the symbolism is obvious--birds and flowers are constant motifs, and in the final scene, a handmade breadboard assumes meanings for Laurel well beyond what one would expect for such a simple item. For those of us who have lived through the death of parents and the disposal of a family home, this novel has a resonance rare in modern fiction, one which transcends the period in which it was written and the Deep South (U.S.) location in which it is set. Mary Whipple

Grief and love, 04 Feb 2008
Like love, grief is ultimately something that we must all go through alone. There can be people who help, but our emotional journeys are ours alone.

And that is the heart of "The Optimist's Daughter," a dark, quiet little novel set in the mid-20th century South. Eudora Welty explores a difficult, emotionally wringing topic -- one woman losing the last loved one she had, and the struggle to come to terms with the many people she's lost.

Elderly but healthy Judge McKelva goes in for an eye operation, but seems strangely lethargic afterwards. His daughter Laurel -- who has been away for several years -- is concerned as her father continues to decline, especially since his flaky second wife Fay is treating him badly, and even has to be physically restrained by a nurse. Then the judge dies.

And Laurel finds herself in her old family home, trying to deal with Fay, her weird family, and the many well-meaning-but-dense friends that McKelva had over the years. But when the house is empty and she is alone, Laurel looks back on her life -- her all-too-brief marriage to a loving man, her mother's horrible death, and her father's remarriage -- and learns how to feel again.

Few books that I've read really handle the subject of grief -- usually people hug, cry, and get over it except for a few pages every now and then, when there is a mention of the Dearly Departed.

But not many authors can really get to the wrenching, lonely core of grief and loss, and how it can set us free, or lock our emotions and throw away the key. And that is basically what "The Optimist's Daughter" is all about -- McKelva's illness and death are a prelude to Laurel's soul-searching, and the exploration of how she handles her grief.

Welty wraps the slow, gradual storyline (which takes only a few days) in warm, colourful prose ("Sienna-bright leaves and thorns like spurts of matchflame had pierced through..."). She does have a tendency to let the dialogue from various people ramble, but often that rambling makes some very sharp points about loss, such as how the well-meaning often tell white lies about the dead, or ignore their dying wishes.

Laurel is kind of a nonentity for the first half of the book -- she's all locked up in herself, and we don't know much about her. But then Welty paints the devastating pain and guilt that she's been feeling, and shows how you have to let go of the past in order to live the future. Quite a contrast to the childish, putrescent Fay, whose rallying cry is always "What about ME?" and who accuses her dying husband of ruining her birthday.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is only optimistic as it ends -- up until then, it's a beautifully painful look at love, loss, and grief. A magnificent story, if a rather uncomfortable one.

Especially meaningful to people of a "certain age.", 20 Oct 2002
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, this moving study of memory and the progression of generations is still vibrant and relevant thirty years later. Not only does it show us the ripple effect that one person's passing has on loved ones, it also shows us the changes to society which occur as older generations pass away and new generations take their place.

Welty's concern here is with values--those traditional southern (U.S.) values learned by Laurel, the daughter of a Mississippi judge, from her parents; those learned by her parents from their parents; those imparted by the town she grew up in and the people who lived there; and those which Laurel has absorbed from her life as an artist in Chicago. In her values she is in direct contrast with Fay, the judge's young second wife, a crass and selfish woman from Texas with a large, boisterous, and uneducated family--a woman whose only desire is to come out a winner. When the judge dies, Laurel returns temporarily to her old room in the family home, which, Fay takes great pains to remind her, now belongs to Fay. There, surrounded by family belongings, she is assailed by memories of her childhood, her mother, her mother's final illness, and her relationship with her father. Her pre-occupation with the past is in direct contrast with Fay's concern with the present and her future--these women clearly belong to different worlds, and only Laurel is capable of change or adaptation.

Welty's ear for dialogue is unerring. She reveals character, class, and education in her syntax and choice of vocabulary and creates conflicts from the smallest of details--a misunderstood word, an imagined slight, a presumption. The conflict is leavened by humor in many places, some of it dark, especially when Fay's "no 'count" family arrives at the funeral. The characters themselves lack subtlety, however, and the symbolism is obvious--birds and flowers are constant motifs, and in the final scene, a handmade breadboard assumes meanings for Laurel well beyond what one would expect for such a simple item. For those of us who have lived through the death of parents and the disposal of a family home, this novel has a resonance rare in modern fiction, one which transcends the period in which it was written and the Deep South (U.S.) location in which it is set. Mary Whipple

"I seem to love all my characters.", 07 Oct 2005
This National Book Award winner and treasure trove contain all 41 of Eudora Welty's short stories, including: "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories," (1941); "The Wide Net and Other Stories ,"(1943); the seven interlocking narratives of "The Golden Apples," (1949), "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories," 1955, as well as two previously uncollected works, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (1963), and "The Demonstrators" (1966). Miss Welty also wrote a Preface especially for this edition, in which she says: "I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself."

The intricacies of human relationships is the primary theme in this collection of short fiction. Eudora Welty's works combine wonderful humor and an astute perception of human psychology. Her ear for dialogue is superb and her prose lyrical and nuanced.

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi where she spent most of her life. From the moment of publication, her collections of stories won wide critical acclaim, as did her novels, "The Robber Bridegroom," "Delta Wedding," "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles," and "The Optimist's Daughter," which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. Her autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings, won both the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. In 1996, Welty was given France's highest civilian honor, the French Legion of Honor Award.

This is a remarkable compilation of short fiction by one of the most gifted writers of our time. This volume enriches any library it graces. Highly recommended.
JANA

Grief and love, 04 Feb 2008
Like love, grief is ultimately something that we must all go through alone. There can be people who help, but our emotional journeys are ours alone.

And that is the heart of "The Optimist's Daughter," a dark, quiet little novel set in the mid-20th century South. Eudora Welty explores a difficult, emotionally wringing topic -- one woman losing the last loved one she had, and the struggle to come to terms with the many people she's lost.

Elderly but healthy Judge McKelva goes in for an eye operation, but seems strangely lethargic afterwards. His daughter Laurel -- who has been away for several years -- is concerned as her father continues to decline, especially since his flaky second wife Fay is treating him badly, and even has to be physically restrained by a nurse. Then the judge dies.

And Laurel finds herself in her old family home, trying to deal with Fay, her weird family, and the many well-meaning-but-dense friends that McKelva had over the years. But when the house is empty and she is alone, Laurel looks back on her life -- her all-too-brief marriage to a loving man, her mother's horrible death, and her father's remarriage -- and learns how to feel again.

Few books that I've read really handle the subject of grief -- usually people hug, cry, and get over it except for a few pages every now and then, when there is a mention of the Dearly Departed.

But not many authors can really get to the wrenching, lonely core of grief and loss, and how it can set us free, or lock our emotions and throw away the key. And that is basically what "The Optimist's Daughter" is all about -- McKelva's illness and death are a prelude to Laurel's soul-searching, and the exploration of how she handles her grief.

Welty wraps the slow, gradual storyline (which takes only a few days) in warm, colourful prose ("Sienna-bright leaves and thorns like spurts of matchflame had pierced through..."). She does have a tendency to let the dialogue from various people ramble, but often that rambling makes some very sharp points about loss, such as how the well-meaning often tell white lies about the dead, or ignore their dying wishes.

Laurel is kind of a nonentity for the first half of the book -- she's all locked up in herself, and we don't know much about her. But then Welty paints the devastating pain and guilt that she's been feeling, and shows how you have to let go of the past in order to live the future. Quite a contrast to the childish, putrescent Fay, whose rallying cry is always "What about ME?" and who accuses her dying husband of ruining her birthday.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is only optimistic as it ends -- up until then, it's a beautifully painful look at love, loss, and grief. A magnificent story, if a rather uncomfortable one.

Especially meaningful to people of a "certain age.", 20 Oct 2002
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, this moving study of memory and the progression of generations is still vibrant and relevant thirty years later. Not only does it show us the ripple effect that one person's passing has on loved ones, it also shows us the changes to society which occur as older generations pass away and new generations take their place.

Welty's concern here is with values--those traditional southern (U.S.) values learned by Laurel, the daughter of a Mississippi judge, from her parents; those learned by her parents from their parents; those imparted by the town she grew up in and the people who lived there; and those which Laurel has absorbed from her life as an artist in Chicago. In her values she is in direct contrast with Fay, the judge's young second wife, a crass and selfish woman from Texas with a large, boisterous, and uneducated family--a woman whose only desire is to come out a winner. When the judge dies, Laurel returns temporarily to her old room in the family home, which, Fay takes great pains to remind her, now belongs to Fay. There, surrounded by family belongings, she is assailed by memories of her childhood, her mother, her mother's final illness, and her relationship with her father. Her pre-occupation with the past is in direct contrast with Fay's concern with the present and her future--these women clearly belong to different worlds, and only Laurel is capable of change or adaptation.

Welty's ear for dialogue is unerring. She reveals character, class, and education in her syntax and choice of vocabulary and creates conflicts from the smallest of details--a misunderstood word, an imagined slight, a presumption. The conflict is leavened by humor in many places, some of it dark, especially when Fay's "no 'count" family arrives at the funeral. The characters themselves lack subtlety, however, and the symbolism is obvious--birds and flowers are constant motifs, and in the final scene, a handmade breadboard assumes meanings for Laurel well beyond what one would expect for such a simple item. For those of us who have lived through the death of parents and the disposal of a family home, this novel has a resonance rare in modern fiction, one which transcends the period in which it was written and the Deep South (U.S.) location in which it is set. Mary Whipple

"I seem to love all my characters.", 07 Oct 2005
This National Book Award winner and treasure trove contain all 41 of Eudora Welty's short stories, including: "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories," (1941); "The Wide Net and Other Stories ,"(1943); the seven interlocking narratives of "The Golden Apples," (1949), "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories," 1955, as well as two previously uncollected works, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (1963), and "The Demonstrators" (1966). Miss Welty also wrote a Preface especially for this edition, in which she says: "I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself."

The intricacies of human relationships is the primary theme in this collection of short fiction. Eudora Welty's works combine wonderful humor and an astute perception of human psychology. Her ear for dialogue is superb and her prose lyrical and nuanced.

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi where she spent most of her life. From the moment of publication, her collections of stories won wide critical acclaim, as did her novels, "The Robber Bridegroom," "Delta Wedding," "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles," and "The Optimist's Daughter," which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. Her autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings, won both the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. In 1996, Welty was given France's highest civilian honor, the French Legion of Honor Award.

This is a remarkable compilation of short fiction by one of the most gifted writers of our time. This volume enriches any library it graces. Highly recommended.
JANA

Beautiful, Subtle, Resonating Stories, 22 Apr 1999
"The Golden Apples" is one of the five best short story collections I've read. Welty's description of character, and its transformation throughout life (it's almost like an episodic novel) is subtle, humorous, and moving. Her style is poetic yet lucid, perfect for the emotionally complex situations she describes. The citizens of Morgana, Mississippi, with all their virtues, flaws and perversities, reminded me of Anderson's "Winesberg, Ohio." But Welty's eye seems defter, deeper, less given to easy pay-off and caricature. Similarly, she is superior to Flannary O'Connor because her tales deal with the nuances of everyday events rather than thunder-and-lightning epiphanies.

Dive into this swirling, invigorating pool and have your views of people and the world changed, as were mine.

Grief and love, 04 Feb 2008
Like love, grief is ultimately something that we must all go through alone. There can be people who help, but our emotional journeys are ours alone.

And that is the heart of "The Optimist's Daughter," a dark, quiet little novel set in the mid-20th century South. Eudora Welty explores a difficult, emotionally wringing topic -- one woman losing the last loved one she had, and the struggle to come to terms with the many people she's lost.

Elderly but healthy Judge McKelva goes in for an eye operation, but seems strangely lethargic afterwards. His daughter Laurel -- who has been away for several years -- is concerned as her father continues to decline, especially since his flaky second wife Fay is treating him badly, and even has to be physically restrained by a nurse. Then the judge dies.

And Laurel finds herself in her old family home, trying to deal with Fay, her weird family, and the many well-meaning-but-dense friends that McKelva had over the years. But when the house is empty and she is alone, Laurel looks back on her life -- her all-too-brief marriage to a loving man, her mother's horrible death, and her father's remarriage -- and learns how to feel again.

Few books that I've read really handle the subject of grief -- usually people hug, cry, and get over it except for a few pages every now and then, when there is a mention of the Dearly Departed.

But not many authors can really get to the wrenching, lonely core of grief and loss, and how it can set us free, or lock our emotions and throw away the key. And that is basically what "The Optimist's Daughter" is all about -- McKelva's illness and death are a prelude to Laurel's soul-searching, and the exploration of how she handles her grief.

Welty wraps the slow, gradual storyline (which takes only a few days) in warm, colourful prose ("Sienna-bright leaves and thorns like spurts of matchflame had pierced through..."). She does have a tendency to let the dialogue from various people ramble, but often that rambling makes some very sharp points about loss, such as how the well-meaning often tell white lies about the dead, or ignore their dying wishes.

Laurel is kind of a nonentity for the first half of the book -- she's all locked up in herself, and we don't know much about her. But then Welty paints the devastating pain and guilt that she's been feeling, and shows how you have to let go of the past in order to live the future. Quite a contrast to the childish, putrescent Fay, whose rallying cry is always "What about ME?" and who accuses her dying husband of ruining her birthday.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is only optimistic as it ends -- up until then, it's a beautifully painful look at love, loss, and grief. A magnificent story, if a rather uncomfortable one.

Especially meaningful to people of a "certain age.", 20 Oct 2002
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, this moving study of memory and the progression of generations is still vibrant and relevant thirty years later. Not only does it show us the ripple effect that one person's passing has on loved ones, it also shows us the changes to society which occur as older generations pass away and new generations take their place.

Welty's concern here is with values--those traditional southern (U.S.) values learned by Laurel, the daughter of a Mississippi judge, from her parents; those learned by her parents from their parents; those imparted by the town she grew up in and the people who lived there; and those which Laurel has absorbed from her life as an artist in Chicago. In her values she is in direct contrast with Fay, the judge's young second wife, a crass and selfish woman from Texas with a large, boisterous, and uneducated family--a woman whose only desire is to come out a winner. When the judge dies, Laurel returns temporarily to her old room in the family home, which, Fay takes great pains to remind her, now belongs to Fay. There, surrounded by family belongings, she is assailed by memories of her childhood, her mother, her mother's final illness, and her relationship with her father. Her pre-occupation with the past is in direct contrast with Fay's concern with the present and her future--these women clearly belong to different worlds, and only Laurel is capable of change or adaptation.

Welty's ear for dialogue is unerring. She reveals character, class, and education in her syntax and choice of vocabulary and creates conflicts from the smallest of details--a misunderstood word, an imagined slight, a presumption. The conflict is leavened by humor in many places, some of it dark, especially when Fay's "no 'count" family arrives at the funeral. The characters themselves lack subtlety, however, and the symbolism is obvious--birds and flowers are constant motifs, and in the final scene, a handmade breadboard assumes meanings for Laurel well beyond what one would expect for such a simple item. For those of us who have lived through the death of parents and the disposal of a family home, this novel has a resonance rare in modern fiction, one which transcends the period in which it was written and the Deep South (U.S.) location in which it is set. Mary Whipple

"I seem to love all my characters.", 07 Oct 2005
This National Book Award winner and treasure trove contain all 41 of Eudora Welty's short stories, including: "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories," (1941); "The Wide Net and Other Stories ,"(1943); the seven interlocking narratives of "The Golden Apples," (1949), "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories," 1955, as well as two previously uncollected works, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" (1963), and "The Demonstrators" (1966). Miss Welty also wrote a Preface especially for this edition, in which she says: "I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself."

The intricacies of human relationships is the primary theme in this collection of short fiction. Eudora Welty's works combine wonderful humor and an astute perception of human psychology. Her ear for dialogue is superb and her prose lyrical and nuanced.

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi where she spent most of her life. From the moment of publication, her collections of stories won wide critical acclaim, as did her novels, "The Robber Bridegroom," "Delta Wedding," "The Ponder Heart," "Losing Battles," and "The Optimist's Daughter," which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. Her autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings, won both the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. In 1996, Welty was given France's highest civilian honor, the French Legion of Honor Award.

This is a remarkable compilation of short fiction by one of the most gifted writers of our time. This volume enriches any library it graces. Highly recommended.
JANA

Beautiful, Subtle, Resonating Stories, 22 Apr 1999
"The Golden Apples" is one of the five best short story collections I've read. Welty's description of character, and its transformation throughout life (it's almost like an episodic novel) is subtle, humorous, and moving. Her style is poetic yet lucid, perfect for the emotionally complex situations she describes. The citizens of Morgana, Mississippi, with all their virtues, flaws and perversities, reminded me of Anderson's "Winesberg, Ohio." But Welty's eye seems defter, deeper, less given to easy pay-off and caricature. Similarly, she is superior to Flannary O'Connor because her tales deal with the nuances of everyday events rather than thunder-and-lightning epiphanies.

Dive into this swirling, invigorating pool and have your views of people and the world changed, as were mine.

Creations of a unique voice., 19 Aug 2003
"Listening," "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice," Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography "One Writer's Beginnings," the concluding entry in this collection, one of the two Library of America compilations dedicated to her work. And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty's compact autobiography is notable both because it allows a rare glimpse into the celebrated writer's otherwise fiercely protected private life and it illustrates the roots from which sprang such extraordinary protagonists as "The Ponder Heart"'s Edna Earle and Daniel Ponder, Miss Eckhart and the Morgana families in "The Golden Apples" and, of course, the anti-heroes of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Optimist's Daughter," Judge McKelva, his second wife Fay and (most importantly) his daughter Laurel.

A native and - with minimal exceptions - lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi, Welty received her first introduction to storytelling as a listener; and early on, learned to sharpen her ears not only to a story's contents but also to its narrator and its protagonists' individual nature: "[T]here [never was] a line read that I didn't hear," and "any room ... at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to," she notes in "One Writer's Beginnings," adding that the discovery that all those stories had been written by someone, not come into existence of their own, not only surprised but also severely disappointed her. Equally importantly, family visits to relatives brought out the born observer in her; each trip providing its own lessons and revelations, each a story onto itself - the seed from which later grew the literary creations collected in this compilation and its companion volume. At the same time, her father's interest in technology introduced her to photography as a means of capturing visual impressions, one moment at a time; and when traveling around Mississippi as an agent for a state agency (her first job) she learned to use that camera as "a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know" and discovered that "to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was [then] the greatest need I had" ("One Writer's Beginnings:" Not surprisingly, her photography was published in several collections which have found much acclaim of their own.)

Thus, from early childhood on, Eudora Welty not only had a keen sense of the world around her but also, of words as such: of their existence as much as the interrelation between their sound, physical appearance and the things they stand for. Encouraged by her mother, a teacher, and over her father's worries (he considered fiction writing an occupation of dubitable financial promise and, worse, inferior to fact because it was "not true") Welty embarked on a writer's path which would lead her to award-winning heights and to a reputation as one of the South's finest writers, with as abounding as obvious comparisons to fellow Mississippian William Faulkner in particular; a literary debt she acknowledged when she wrote that "his work, though it can't increase in itself, increases us" and "[w]hat is written in the South from now on is going to be taken into account by Faulkner's work" ("Must the Novelist Crusade?", 1965). The Library of America dedicated two volumes to her work; one containing her novels, the other - this one - her short stories, essays (some, like her autobiography, based on a series of lectures) and her autobiography.

An approach that Welty developed early on was to consider the publication of her stories in periodicals merely a step towards each story's final shape, and she generally revised her stories before including them in collections. This compilation brings together all her short stories in the versions intended to be final by Welty herself: the 1941 edition of "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (her first short story collection), the 1943 edition of "The Wide Net and Other Stories" and the 1949 edition of "The Golden Apples" - each collection suffered substantial editorial revisions in subsequent publications. Included are also two stand-alone short stories ("Where is This Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators"), the first one inspired by the 1963 murder of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers and revised by Welty over the telephone after having been accepted by "The New Yorker," to avoid a potentially prejudicial effect of its original ending on the then-impending trial.

A keen observer, Welty was also a writer endowed with a sharp sense of humor and satire, and with the gift to brilliantly use location, localisms, accents, patterns of speech and customs to make a point. Not a single word is wasted: "Marrying must have been some of his showing off - like man never married at all till *he* flung in," we're told about King MacLain in the opening story of "The Golden Apples," "Shower of Gold." And you don't have to learn anything more about the man, do you? Equally as instructive on Welty's writing are the eight essays included in this collection, all taken from the 1978 compilation "The Eye of the Story" and dealing with particular aspects of her own fiction as much as, more generally, with "Place in Fiction" (1954) and the fiction writer's role ("Writing and Analyzing a Story," originally published in 1955 under the title "How I Write" and substantially revised for its inclusion in "The Eye of the Story" and "Must the Novelist Crusade?").

"There is no explanation outside fiction for what its writer is learning to do," Eudora Welty maintained in "Writing and Analyzing a Story;" explaining that each story references only the writer's vision at the moment of the creation of that story, and the creative process itself: nothing that can be "mapped and plotted" but a product taking shape in the process of creation itself, giving each story a unique identity of its own. And while her fiction, alas, can no longer grow any more than Faulkner's, she has left us enough of those unique creations to cherish for a long time to come.