This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations. "The Optimist's Daughter" is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding...

This omnibus volume by one of the South's greatest writers includes stories published prior to 1980. Stories are 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.

Eudora Welty's subjects are the people who live in southern towns like Jackson, Mississippi, which has been her home for all of her long life. 'I've stayed in one place, ' she says, and 'it's become the source of the information that stirs my imagination'. Her distinctive voice and wry observations are rooted in the southern conversational tradition. The stories in this volume, from the first two collections she published, range in tone from the quietly...

Eudora Welty was one of the twentieth century's greatest literary figures. For as long as students have been studying her fiction as literature, writers have been looking to her to answer the profound questions of what makes a story good, a novel successful, a writer an artist. On writing presents the answers in seven concise chapters discussing the subjects most important to the narrative craft, and which every fiction writer should know, such as...

In this delightful combination of symphonic score, entrancing vocals, and narrative performance, learn why shoes are for the birds.