Eudora Welty, who died on July 23rd aged 92, was perhaps the most discreetly eminent of the 20th century's great American writers. In spite of the countless accolades and awards her work garnered, both in the United States and abroad, she remained a regional writer, whose quietly magnificent short stories and novels are suffused with Chekhovian wit and clear-sightedness.
A lifelong resident of Jackson, Mississippi, she was concerned, above all, with the lives and trials of ordinary southern men and women, and with the quotidian rhythms of their speech.
"Fiction has, and must keep, a private address," she once wrote. "For life is lived in a private place; where it means anything is inside the mind and heart."
Eudora Welty was born in Jackson to Mary Chestina and Christian Webb Welty. Her father was director of the Lamar life insurance company and, with her two younger brothers, she was raised in a comfortable and loving home, in which - as she recalled in One Writer's Beginnings (1984) - a passion for language and storytelling was instilled early, along with the values of the New Testament.
Educated at the Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, Mississippi, and at the University of Wisconsin, gaining her BA in 1929, she moved to New York in 1930 to study advertising at the Columbia University business school.
But she did not stay long in the northeast: in 1931, following her father's death, she returned to Jackson, where she lived, in the family home, for the rest of her life.
She held various jobs - on local newspapers and at a radio station - before becoming publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programme. Travelling through the state of Mississippi opened her eyes to the misery of the great depression, and resulted in a series of photographs eventually published, in 1971, as One Time, One Place: Mississippi In The Depression, A Snapshot Album.
In 1936, Eudora Welty's WPA job came to an end, her photographs were exhibited in New York, and her first short stories, Magic and Death Of A Travelling Salesman, were published in small magazines.
The latter - a powerful and almost mystical account of a stranded salesman who seeks refuge in the home of two hillbillies, only to meet his death - remains one of her best known, a small masterpiece.
This early work brought her to the attention of the literary agent Diarmuid Russell, with whom she enjoyed a long and fruitful attachment, and of writers such as William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter. Porter wrote the introduction to Eudora Welty's first story collection, A Curtain Of Green, which appeared in 1941.
There followed a decade and a half of impressive prolificacy and diversity. By 1955, she had written most of the works on which her reputation rests: the novels The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Delta Wedding (1946) and The Ponder Heart (1954); the linked stories of The Golden Apples (1949), and, above all, the subtle, often wry, and always luminous stories which are her finest achievement.
Some of these, such as the riotous Why I Live At The PO - in which a disgruntled small-town postmistress alienates her family members one by one, until the only refuge left her is a cot in the post office - are so widely read in US schools that they are genuinely a part of that increasingly limited repertoire, America's common literary culture.
In addition to A Curtain Of Green, The Wide Net And Other Stories appeared in 1943; The Bride Of Innisfallen & Other Stories in 1955. Had she never written another word, Eudora Welty's place in literature would have been assured.
During the mid-1940s, she enjoyed a brief tenure as a staff writer on the New York Times Book Review, often publishing under the pseudonym "Michael Ravenna", imposed upon her after an editor complained that a southern woman, whatever her literary talents, could not appear to be authoritative on war subjects. During this period, too, she travelled to Europe: first on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1949-50, when she formed a close friendship with Elizabeth Bowen, to whom The Bride Of Innisfallen is dedicated; and again in 1955, when she lectured at Cambridge University. "I was the first women ever to cross the threshold into the hall at Peterhouse," she later recalled.
Eudora Welty's mother, with whom she lived and whom she nursed, died in the 1960s, and it was not until 1970 that she published her next book, a family novel entitled Losing Battles. This was followed, in 1972, by The Optimist's Daughter, a powerful exploration of a woman coming to terms with her father's death, which won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1972, she also received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Eudora Welty's only foray into memoir was the much-loved One Writer's Beginnings, compiled from a series of lectures she gave at Harvard University. Even this is not autobiographical in any consistent, or explanatory, manner; rather, as its title suggests, it traces the development, through childhood, of her literary sensibility and her love of narrative.
In general, however, she was an author who shied away from the confessional, and who felt strongly that fiction should draw upon life only in oblique ways. She believed that "your private life should be kept private. My own, I don't think, would particularly interest anybody, for that matter. But I'd guard it; I feel strongly about that."
Eudora Welty was private, indeed, but she was also gracious and entertaining, a renowned anecdotalist and beloved fixture of her native Jackson to the end. In her last years, arthritis prevented her from writing, and she was largely confined to the downstairs rooms of her house. But her spirit remained intact, and she continued to receive visitors.
Her acknowledged literary influences included Jane Austen, Chekhov, Faulkner, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. She takes her place comfortably among them, a chronicler of the American south in all its hues, with an unwavering eye for the true gesture, the true sentence.
The limpidity of her prose is best explained in her own words; she took an author's literary style to be "like the smoke from a fired cannon, like the ring in the water after the fish is pulled out or jumps back in".
Eudora Alice Welty: born 1909; died, July 2001