The vast blue eyes of Eudora Welty take in everything. From shrewd observation of the human comedy in her lifelong home of Jackson, Miss., Welty has constructed a body of fiction that invests the grotesque with meaning and the ordinary with beauty. Acclaim has been no stranger to her; one of her five novels, The Optimist's Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. But this has been an exceptional year for Welty. First, at the American Book Awards ceremony, she was given the National Medal for Literature. Then came the publication of her Collected Stories, a welcome reminder that Eudora Welty has no living rival in the fine Southern art of storytelling. "The short story is my favorite form," she says. "When a novel is developed, you set your mind at a different speed, and that's not natural with me. I think it is the Southern nature to tell stories. We all love to talk."
She lives alone in the red-brick house in which she grew up, and cherishes neighbors who know when—and when not—to visit. "People in Jackson are just wonderful to me," says Welty, 71. "When I'm working on something, they don't come knocking on my door." Never married, she says that a perfect day for her would begin with an unseen hand pouring her a cup of coffee. Instead of blocking out mandatory writing time, she works only when she has conceived a specific story. She stops for the day leaving unwritten what she knows will be her next sentence. "It's the starter for the next morning," she explains, "like the yeast for a piece of bread."
Once she wanted to be a photographer and watercolorist. The visual sense remains: "I don't think I could begin a story if I could not summon up a scene. I am fascinated by place. I feel it has so much to tell you." Although Welty frequently wanders from Mississippi in her life and work, she would not live elsewhere. "When I travel, it's because I don't know a place very well and I go to see what they do that's different," she explains. "But you go back home for your material."
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