The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Softcover

One of the truly great works of twentieth-century American literature, Eudora Welty's Collected Stories confirms her place as a contemporary master of short fiction. Welty wrote novels, novellas, and reviews over the course of her long career, but the heart and soul of her literary vision lay with the short story. The forty-one pieces reproduced here, written over a period of three decades, include "A Petrified Man," "Why I Live at the P.O.,""The Wide Net," and "The Bride of Innisfallen." "I have been told," Welty writes in the introduction, "both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters." The characters that spring to life in this masterwork reveal the depth and breadth of her love.

"Miss Welty's short stories are deceptively simple. They are concerned with ordinary people, but what happens to them and the manner of the telling are far from ordinary . . . A fine writer and a distinguished book. "--The New Yorker

"Eudora Welty is one of our purest, finest, gentlest voices and this collection is something to be treasured."--Anne Tyler

"The ironic tenderness of Chekhov, the almost feral edge of Maupassant, the ominousness of Poe and Bierce, the lacy strength of Henry Green. She is probably the finest Mozartian stylist writing in then English language."--Mary Lee Settle

"Stories as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's . . . The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types-farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery-but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision."--Reynolds Price
Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She worked as a photographer during the Depression and published her first book, a collection of short stories, in 1941. In addition to short fiction, Welty wrote novels, novellas, essays, and reviews, and was the winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. By the time of her death in 2001, Welty had established herself as one of the most important and beloved American writers of the twentieth century.